A Merciless Clark Kent Videos LA Crime and Crashes

Rating: 8/10 (1 November 2014)

Nightcrawler, aka 'in TV news if it bleeds it leads' all takes place in a beautifully photographed nighttime Southern California, from Venice Beach to the Valley to the hills, much of it in a car navigating familiar street names with a map app. Jake Gylenhaal is an anonymous monster from "somewhere in the north end of the Valley," chasing crimes and crashes in the city and surrounding. It is all LA, all the way.
And much of it is wonderful. Gylenhaal plays a video news freelance monster who is except for his Valley ref, completely without provenance or background or any emotional structure or reactions at all, a personality that works well in his spooky skill at non-zero sum bargaining. Every scene contains him haggling, he bargains with every single other character, from the news director (Rene Russo, great) to whom he peddles his videos, to the dim assistant he ruthlessly exploits, to a competing video peddler, to cops. Always with the same grim half-smile pokerface, as he moves from nowhere toward his new ambition: an LA news king and seems likely to achieve it.
It's so well paced and drives so fast and so unpredictably that three quarters of the way through you seem to be watching a great movie. But then, unfortunately, the film refuses or fails to get through the Gylenhaal's character armor, and we leave him exactly as we found him - and it needs more.
The problem may be that we're in the wrong genre. Gyllenhaal's Lou Bloom would be an absolutely perfect Marvel comic movie character, a villain perhaps like the Joker; or maybe, with a little adjustment of the Rene Russo character, a kind of demon Clark Kent. As it is, the creepiness that begins chilling becomes irritating, a bell that won't stop ringing; you don't just dislike Bloom, you wind up disliking the movie, despite its great execution.