Disappointing

Rating: 4/10 (17 July 2015)

I was mislead by the synopsis of this movie; it suggested that the protagonist, Lou Bloom, through his own ruthless ambitions at getting a news story no matter what, somehow ends up being a sort of victim. It sounded like it might live up to its little 'thriller' tag. That is so far from the case it's not even funny.
The story: Bloom is a desperate, unemployed man struggling to make ends meet, and then one night he discovers 'nightcrawling' – selling video footage of crimes to TV stations. He employs a young man named Rick and together they ride about at night chasing blood in Los Angeles; they come along a home invasion, Bloom catches the criminals leaving the house and eventually decides to hunt them down, having dire consequences – for everyone but Bloom, that is.
And that is where it all goes awry for me. I can understand that it was the filmmakers point, that sometimes in life, good things happen to bad people and not only do they get away with their tasteless, immoral deeds they are in fact awarded for them. I do understand that, and I don't necessarily have an aversion to that - being honest here: when Anthony Hopkins "had an old friend for dinner" in The Silence of the Lambs, it gave me a dark feeling of glee – that was Hopkins and his Hannibal was basically rather charismatic. But what I felt to be a huge problem here is that Jake Gyllenhaal's Bloom is so completely, entirely, profoundly unlikeable that I was honestly hoping he would get himself killed, or for Rick to just knock him one on the head. He was smarmy and cold, and possessed not one bit of anything human I could relate to; his desperation became callous ambition, and his character was so monotone that I honestly had to skip through some of the scenes to the end because I just couldn't tolerate it anymore; it was literally making my fingers curl into little fists of sublime irritation – THAT'S how bad it was for me. Another irksome component was how Bloom, as a rather strange little upstart could basically threaten and manipulate a veteran of the industry to continue buying his footage.
I dunno. There were just too many cons weighed against the pros for this one; there wasn't much character development, apart from assuming that perhaps they were all acting on their own desperations and needs, be it professional or personal or whatever else – but even that is surmised; and at times it felt rather slowly paced. Though undoubtedly - for me - I think that if they had made Bloom just slightly less of a sordid aspirant the film wouldn't have been as bad as it was; it was certainly nice to look at and it had an interesting story: I liked the idea of exploring just how deep people would scrape the gutters for 'journalism's' sake, without regard for morals or humanity, and to what extent would we disregard the dignity of others for our own benefits (as was sort of the case with Rene Russo's character)... but at the end of the day Gyllenhaal was just too much to bear.
Very, very disappointing, and a waste of money.