Intelligent and twisted, the time travel actioner “Looper” delivers the mind-numbing goods.
My apologies for beginning with a supped up intro a la Peter Travers-Movie Critic for Rolling Stone Magazine but I would, one day, love to be quoted. I don’t care if it’s for the commercial or Blu-ray package, this is one of my personal goals and over-written blurbs seem to be the way to go. “I liked it very much” will not cut mustard. “Rip roaringly original” gets it done.
Besides, “Looper” is pretty rip roaringly original. Writer/director Rian Johnson has crafted a very smart movie that will keep you engaged, start to stop. Johnson has taken the mindless shoot’em up thriller template and injected some well-polished brains into the mold.
“Looper” is wrought with surprises and reveals so let us keep the synopsis slight and simple. Something that can be culled from the trailer. Monosyllabic half words punctuated by grunts and big hand gestures.
It is the future, 2044 to be exact, and time travel has not been invented yet. But it will be in the further future. And what does mankind do with such marvelous technology? Travel to distant times past and view the wonders of our beginnings? Right the wrongs of our forefathers? Nope. Organized crime secretly use the banned science to send unwanted associates to the past so that they can be disposed of quick and clean. That’s the job of a looper. A man appears at a specified time, bound and gagged and he is erased.
Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a looper and seems fine with the job. Good pay in tough times and he is sort of a badass. Every looper knows that the day will come where they will be tasked with killing their older self from 30 years in the future. It’s the only way to tidy up the loose ends. You close the loop. Of course when Joe is finally confronted by Old Joe (Bruce Willis), his aged and wiser self knows what’s coming and escapes. What follows is a cat and mouse chase that is exciting and, yes, rip roaringly original.
“Looper” has its own unique logic that challenges but is never so convoluted as to frustrate. These sorts of things can get cloudy and confounding but the story is laid out in such a way that it is easy to digest.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt is given the hard task of portraying a young Bruce Willis and he succeeds for the most part. Prosthetic have been glued to his face, contacts in the eyes and the effect works in spurts. He nails the furrowed brow and head cocks but it is inconsistent. There are angles when the makeup is distractingly bad and JGL comes off looking like someone you would find in “Sin City” scene trading blows with Mickey Rourke. Willis gets to be Willis. There are some emotional moments that allow the actor some rare depth that are solid. For the most part, he gets off easy compared to Young Joe.
Rian Johnson’s cousin, Nathan, scores the film and there are some over-blown moments when the music swells far too large. The epic feeling of the music is misplaced and belongs in a Spielberg movie. Given the nature of the material, some nice jazz-infused score would have been a better fit. The movie is deliberately paced and drags in the center but makes up for it with a gripping finale. Johnson teamed up before with JGL for 2005’s “Brick”. Both “Brick” and “Looper” are exciting films that give Johnson a distinct point of view relatively early in his career. I cannot wait to see what comes next.
