This movie Bugsy Malone...

Bugsy Malone is the movie I was comparing it to in my head as I watched as well. But just because this film didn't play for overt laughs the way that older film did, it doesn't mean this movie wasn't highly stylized and immensely tongue-in-cheek. Noir dialog is always played very straight, but when you take it out of the urban 40s and put it in suburban Orange County of the present, I found it to be rather funny, and I assumed that's how the film was intended.

Consider that the mastermind kingpin operates out of his mom's basement, and we get the mom serving the gang juice, and later the kingpin makes a random and trite observation about Tolkien.

Try "The Maltese Falcon" as a source.

First and foremost, it was inspired by film noir (the aforementioned The Maltese Falcon absolutely springs to mind). That’s pretty evident.

But young high school kids acting not just like adults but characters from a hard-boiled 40’s detective film in an ostensibly straightforward manner? It may seem ridiculous, but this is a film with a surreal feel and, like mentioned above, it’s tongue-in-cheek. It knows what it’s going for and it succeeds.