Jake Gyllenhaal: 5 Awesome Performances And 5 That Sucked

3. Pilot - Highway

Now the terrible films Jake Gyllenhaal made after Donnie Darko, those he has no excuse for. A mostly-forgotten cruio from 2002 starring Jared Leto and Selma Blair, Highway saw Gyllenhaal starring as a drug dealer called Pilot who gets caught up in a messy situation involving the mob and thus hauls ass out of Las Vegas for Seattle. Along the way he and his best friend Jack (Leto) pick up Cassie (Blair) and hijinks ensue! In this situation hijinks mean bad comedy and a Kurt Cobain tribute. It's one of the stranger road movies Hollywood's produced, and aims to be somewhere between a sharp-witted Tarantino crime thriller and the hallucinogenic trip of Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas. Of course in trying to walk that line it falls flat on its face and instead just a hopelessly dated early noughties semi-indie film with an annoying soundtrack and nothing to say, with Gyllenhaal especially unconvincing as the stoned philosopher Pilot - doubly so since he'd just played Donnie, the straight version of Pilot's joker, the year before.