Looper
Bruce Willis doesn’t have his best days when it comes to time traveling. In Terry Gilliam’s great “12 Monkeys,” he goes right to the edge of sanity as he tries to track down the beginning of a viral strain that will decimate the Earth. In Rian Johnson’s “Looper,” he is sent back to the present day (in 2044) to be killed by, himself, 30 years earlier. Stick with terrorists or sadomasochistic shop dealers, Bruce.
If that one sentence regarding “Looper” threw you for a, er, loop, don’t panic. Johnson– making his third film after the indie favorites, “Brick” and “The Brothers Bloom” –isn’t about to just throw you down a metaphysical rabbit hole. If, like me, you saw those previous films, you know that Johnson wants his audience to embrace their intelligence rather than be dumbfounded by his. In comparison to something like “12 Monkeys” or “Inception,” “Looper” is actually pretty straight-forward, which is part of where its success lies.
The film stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Johnson’s star from “Brick”) as Joe, a man in his late ’30s who works as a hired gun for criminals. The catch is that Joe’s victims are from the future. Whaaa? You see, in the year 2074, time travel is invented, and immediately outlawed, but not before the mob and other criminal outlets get their hands on the technology. Their purpose is simple…easy body disposal. They send someone back in time for a hit man, called a “looper,” to eliminate, and dump in a place where nobody will find them, let along know who they are. Pretty simple, until a “looper” is called upon to kill themselves. How do they know they’re killing themselves? Instead of a payment made in silver plates, the payment is in gold. When that happens, the looper knows he has 30 years to live, and is free to do with that time what he wishes. One day, Joe goes to his kill spot and the person he’s to eliminate is…his elder self (Willis). Old Joe then knocks Young Joe out, starting a race against time for both Joes.
That’s just the teaser. I’m not even going to tell what sort of time travel mayhem Johnson has up his sleeve that leads Young Joe to hide out at a farm house with a young woman (the lovely, lively Emily Blunt) and her son, or how telekinesis fits into it all; that wouldn’t be fair to either you or the filmmakers. I will say that the previous mention of “12 Monkeys” is fitting, not just because of the connection with Willis, but the fact that Johnson’s interest in time travel isn’t so much in the sci-fi aspect of it, but in the moral and emotional implications of his scenario. Joe has been doing this job for a long time; he knows the score, and has even berated a friend and fellow looper (Paul Dano) when he’s forced to kill his future self. But his human side comes out with this dilemma he is faced with, which is heightened by the news that, in the future, a man has come along and basically called for a termination of all loopers. For the first time, there’s a face to the body he kills, and there’s a story that connects him to his mark. Willis’s Joe isn’t necessarily recounting his story to save himself, but rather, to change the future. Of course, as we know from countless other sci-fi films, it’s never as easy as all that.
Johnson’s behind-the scenes team do exceptional work in making this a future not too far removed from our own present (in other words, going for believability rather than art-directed fantasy), all the while giving us striking images (especially regarding the use of telekinesis near the end) that remind us that this is, indeed, a sci-fi movie. All the while, the director’s brother, Nathan, creates another brave and exciting score that is on-par with his work on “The Brothers Bloom” and “Brick.” In the end, however, this film is all about Gordon-Levitt and Willis, who do fantastic work in the same manner of John Travolta and Nicolas Cage in “Face/Off.” The makeup team does the heavy-lifting in making JGL look more like a young Bruce Willis, while the actor adopts Willis’s mannerisms and tone of voice to complete the illusion. Both do some of the best work of their careers, and make “Looper” something more than just your average sci-fi nonsense (see the misbegotten “Total Recall” remake). More importantly, they make you care.
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