Nightcrawler
3.5 Waffles!

If you are looking for some massive indictment of television news or the paparazzi, keep looking elsewhere, because that ship sailed decades ago. Nightcrawler is about a character who is just as scary as any goblin walking the streets during Halloween.

Jake Gyllenhaal stars as Lou Bloom – a lonely, creepy, loser kind of a guy who barely survives by stealing material from construction sites.

One night, he comes across Joe Loder (Bill Paxton) – a videographer who combs the streets of Los Angeles at night trying to obtain shocking, sensational and sellable video footage of car crashes, crimes scenes and more for TV broadcasts.

Lou is a chameleon who becomes fascinated with the business, immerses himself in it, and becomes somewhat of a superstar freelancer selling his own videos to the lowest rated morning news program in town and the overnight news director, Nina (Rene Russo).

However, the demand to keep delivering grows, and Lou seems too willing to do whatever it takes to get the perfect shot.

How far will he go?

Writer/director Dan Gilroy has been watching Taxi Driver because Lou might as well be a 21st Century Travis Bickle, and Gyllenhaal seems to be having fun channeling his inner Robert De Niro.

Nightcrawler is fascinating because of Gyllenhaal. It is a performance riding a fine line between dramatic and overly campy or silly, but Gyllenhaal adds the right amount of intensity, dedication and creepiness to make Lou a dangerous psychopath instead of a comical character.

Give this character to Nicolas Cage and we are rolling in the aisles at how bad it is.

Give it to Gyllenhaal and you have a captivating, menacing performance.

He makes Lou awesomely weird as we watch the young man copying the mannerisms and behaviors he thinks the world values because he read about it on the internet, or watched someone else do the same thing. As written by Gilroy, Lou is a dangerous sponge who soaks up information or behaviors, then taints it as he tries to regurgitate it and use it to his advantage.

Gyllenhaal gets this about Lou and gives him a stilted speech pattern and facial expressions that help the audience understand when the troubled man is delivering some knowledge he obtained from another source or copying the behaviors of someone else. Then, he adds a steely calm and evil to Lou that is shocking, especially as his confidence grows. He’s always on the edge of mayhem, and Gyllenhaal never lets you forget it.

Gilroy brilliantly makes Nightcrawler a movie that slowly boils to its explosive climax. Along with Gyllenhaal, Gilroy moderately lets Lou’s creepiness grow and become unveiled a piece at a time. It’s perfectly paced.

A couple logic issues hurt the story, but Nightcrawler is worth checking out. Don’t get caught sneaking in the leftover Halloween candy this weekend.

Nightcrawler is rated R for violence including graphic images, and for language.