Who is our main character?

Rating: 7/10 (27 November 2018)

I always thought main characters needed a fair amount of background information so we can identify with them better and thus making our movie experience way more enjoyable. However, this one here doesn't give us much. We have a burglar. A burgler who is a rational, win and success-oriented psychopath who piece by piece gets what he wants simply by being a "quick learner". We don't know why he is like that in the first place. We don't know why, for example, he didn't use his creative energy and his seemingly unlimited ambition and work ethic to get a decent and well-payed job; did he go to university? did he even finish school? where did he get his brainpower from? just by reading stuff in books or online? For some reason, the writers do not want to give us this information. Maybe we don't need to know it, but I think it could've helped occasionally, because every antihero / villain has a specific reason why he or she developed into the monster that they are now which can make certain notions relatable. All in all, the character Lou doesn't develop much throughout this movie, and usually, this is essential. Lou gets people killed for his own benefit. But we don't know if he hasn't done that before, so we can't really tell if he is developing or not. Yes, he fails at the beginning of his job and succeeds at the end but he never changes his attitude, he doesn't develop personally. To me, this is a little problematic, HOWEVER, I think Jake Gyllenhall plays his part brilliantly and the idea of the story is just fantastic. How far would you go for the perfect image / video material? I also liked how his situation within the storyline successively escalates: 1. Move dead body for the sake of a better shot, 2. Manipulate the car of his opponent causing an accident, 3. Actually stage a crime scene and be there before anything happens. ... so that is all great! I liked the cinematography as well, they really managed to build up thrilling scenes of high suspense by matching form and content. 7/10... Apperantly, movies can work without much background information on their main character. There are probably even tons of good movies that do that and I'm not even aware of it yet. I personally don't like that, though :) still a good movie to me because of anything else