REVIEW - Nightcrawler (2014)

Screenwriter Dan Gilroy (FREEJACK, THE FALL, THE BOURNE LEGACY) comes screaming out of the gate as a first time director with this incredibly solid effort that points a scathingly critical finger at the TMZ generation, where news is no longer news, and it's purveyors have become completely morally bankrupt. He wraps it all in a neo-noir/action infused package, and boy oh boy does it work.
Lou Bloom is a petty thief, whose intelligence and ability to learn almost anything with scary speed, is bellied by his almost psychotic banter. An authority on seemingly everything, Lou pulls over one night on the freeway to observe a terrible car accident, and after watching an independent news gathering cameraman, walks away with the seeds of a new career rolling around in his constantly bubbling brain.
After stealing an expensive bike, and trading it up for an outdated camcorder, he's off cruising the LA night looking for his own footage to capture, and sell.  Faster than you can say "Perez Hilton",
he's leveling up, hiring on a destitute young man, Rick, to be his navigator, and together they comb the police band on their scanner, mastering the codes, rushing off to capture images of crime and terror as they happen. His buyer is Nina, an aging female news director at a low rent local station, who needs the tawdry footage to aid her plummeting ratings. Eventually, Lou's nocturnal submissions yield incredibly up close and personal captures of the most heinous of human behavior. He gets Nina what she needs, in her own words something akin to "A screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut". Eventually, he comes upon the aftermath of a home invasion. Arriving before the police, he enters the house with his camera, and returns with content that may or may not be legal. It sure as hell isn't moral. But who cares? It's ratings sweep time, and numbers mean money.
Jake Gyllenhaal, as the increasingly psychotic and psychopathic news gatherer, hits a whole new level of creepy here, and the comparisons of his performance to that of DeNiro as Travis Bickle in the classic TAXI DRIVER are absolutely warranted. The supporting cast of Rizwan Ahmed (BRITZ, FOUR LIONS, also an MC in his native London), Rene Russo as the desperate aging beauty now trying to stay afloat in the ruthless industry that is the nightly news, and Bill Paxton as a competing camera-hawk, all help to make this easily one of the best films of 2014.
NIGHTCRAWLER is heavy on the parable, but damn it works, and while it's shaking that "scathingly critical finger" I talked about earlier, at the characters, as well as us the viewer, it's also providing one hell of an exciting ride, albeit at 80 miles an hour down the crowded downtown streets of Los Angeles. Hang on, NIGHTCRAWLER is going to turn your knuckles white.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5



~Sean Smithson