With anticipation, I settled on the sofa with the Left-Side, our Cavalier King Charles and a plate of sweet potato fries to enjoy Jake Gyllenhaal be a night crawler. Oh, to be thrilled by a thriller!
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| Jake brought the monotone. |
It had been awhile since I had seen Rene Russo, and she always adds a nice bit of interest to a film (see: Get Shorty). For me, Bill Paxton will forever be the slime-ball used car salesman in, True Lies, but I kept an open mind.
The movie ranked high on Rotten Tomatoes and Jake had received some award nominations, so it had to be good. Really good.
Credits rolled and a dark mood settled over each scene. Jake, looking gaunt and weird, spoke in a creepy monotone. In every scene, he took the role of free-lance videographer behaving like a criminal to levels of...who CARES!
Yes, he did a good job of being strange. But, I have always felt he really is strange, so was it much of a stretch?
I hoped for some thrill and an exciting story or characters. I kept hoping until the bitter end. It never happened for me.
Rene, Bill and the other cast members seemed to be in a daze...as though they did not want to upstage Jake and his glazed eyeballs.
The good news is that we watched this in the comfort of our own place with excellent snacks. The flip-side of that good news is that this film now rests in our cloud. Yeah, we bought it.
Sitting through this movie at the theater would have made ME want to night crawl my bored ass right down the aisle and out to the lobby to look for a way to sneak into a better movie.
If I may steal a quote uttered by Maude Lebowski (Julianne Moore) in The Big Lebowski..."The plot was ludicrous."
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Right-Side hit the nail on the head (all of them) in this so-called "thriller" that was, more to the point, a one-man acting clinic. That one man being Jake, playing weird and creepy Louis Bloom. This movie is the latest incarnation of Hollywood tackling the "TV will do anything for ratings" storyline (if you really want to see the best version of that, rent Network -- it's brilliant).
I don't mind a little credibility-stretching, but seriously, are the LA police really this inept? -- The Left-Side
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