His Movie Review: Nightcrawler (2014)

Why he watched it: Seemed to get good reviews

His rating: 2 out of 5 stars

His review: Movies have a tough challenge. They have to establish a tone or create a setup, and then maintain that throughout several hours. I find for many films, this is hard to do. They start well, but then make a wrong turn and everything comes apart.

This movie had me for the first half or so. Jake Gyllenhall plays Lou Bloom, a strange character in search of a life. He stumbles upon independent crime journalists (a loose use of that word)–videographers who sell their clips of crime and accident scenes to TV news. Bloom seems to come from same world as Travis Bickle of Taxi Driver. They both have singular visions that push them beyond moral boundaries. While Bickle saw himself battling corruption, Bloom sees no moral boundaries in his drive to succeed. By the end of the film we are willing to see the extremes he is willing to take to get the video he wants.

The problem, though, is that this film loses sight of who or what this film is about. At first it seems to be about Lou Bloom and us squirming as we wonder where his oddness will take us. Then the movie decides it wants to be a commentary of television news and the “if it bleeds it leads” mantra. Of course, the ending of Taxi Driver is social commentary–the line between maniac and hero caused by chance. But Nightcrawler makes this move so obviously and so extreme that it fails. By the time Bloom has manipulated a TV news producer into this schemes, I was disappointed. What had started as a fascinating character turned into predictable and unoriginal tedium. When the extremes of Bloom’s drive is revealed at the end, I was neither stunned or surprised. I was ready to pop in Taxi Driver and see a great movie that did it right.