Looper Review
By Karen Dahlstrom
Throwing Sci-Fi for a Loop
When watching a movie about time travel, it's best not to get hung up too much on the logic of it all (or lack thereof). Time travel is, after all, just a plot device. You could get a migraine trying to figure out all the ins and outs of multiple realities and causalities. Just relax and take the ride (case in point, the "Back to the Future" series - short on science, long on fun). This advice is particularly useful when watching "Looper", a sci-fi noir set in the not-too-distant future. While not entirely logical (and really, does it need to be?) or cohesive, it has some nifty moments to help breathe new life in an old trope.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Joe, a hit man for the mob in 2044 Kansas. As he explains it (in film noir-style narration), time travel exists in the future, but it's mob-controlled. They use it to send back targets to "loopers" like Joe for evidence-free disposal. Again, best not to dwell on specifics. Suffice it to say, Joe's job is to whack whomever they send back to the past - even if it's his future self. See, when a looper's career ends, he's sent back to be killed by his younger version, thus "closing the loop."
Looper work pays well enough for guys like Joe to look past the built-in job termination. In the dystopian future, most ordinary folk are barely scraping by. When not blowing away faceless targets with their blunderbusses, the loopers blow their money on fast cars, sharp clothes, girls and drugs. They actually look forward to do the day when they can close their loop and get their golden paycheck to really start living. They soon get their wish when a shadowy boss from the future (known only as "The Rainmaker") starts ordering all the loops closed.
Failing to kill your loop is...well, let's just say it's bad. We find this out when Joe's buddy, Seth (Paul Dano), is unable to off his older self. Letting your loop go (as you can imagine) can mess up that whole space-time continuum thing, so the punishment is swift and brutal. In a gruesome but clever touch, we find out just how brutal: as the mob takes Seth apart piece by piece, Old Seth suddenly finds himself scarred and limbless as he tries to make his getaway.
Joe soon finds himself in a similar position when he's confronted by his own loop, played by Bruce Willis. When he realizes who he has to kill, a shocked Joe is overcome by his target, who gets away before he can finish the job. Or does he? Due to the nature of the time-travel storyline, we actually see both scenarios. In the first, Joe does his job, gets his payday and lives the life of a bad, bad man until he meets a lovely lady, gets married and settles down. When The Rainmaker decides it's time to close Joe's loop, his wife is killed in the crossfire. Old Joe uses the time portal in order to find The Rainmaker and kill him to get his life back. And now the other scenario: Old Joe escapes and goes on a "Terminator"-type quest to find and destroy The Rainmaker before he can come to power, as Young Joe hunts his older self in order to make good with the mob and escape Seth's fate. It's a race to both save and end his own life - a pretty clever twist.
Writer/director Rian Johnson is no stranger to twisting old genres. In "Brick" (also starring Gordon-Levitt), he cleverly transposed classic film noir plotting and lingo to a high school setting. Visually, "Looper" has some really nice sequences that - like some of the language and plot elements - seem lifted from other sources, spun around and polished up. You can tell when a shot was inspired by Scorsese or Hitchcock, but it seems more like a winking homage than a straight lift. But where Johnson (and the film) falters is in tying all these cool elements into a cohesive story. "Looper" feels like two separate films, loosely chained together with vignette-like set pieces. Is it noir? Is it sci-fi? Is it a horror movie? And while there are some exciting visual moments, it would be remiss not to address the main flaw of the film: Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Bruce Willis makeup. Like Nicole Kidman's nose in "
The Hours", it's nearly impossible not to be distracted while he tries to make the best of his awkward prosthetics.
And while JGL can do a fairly admirable Willis impression, there's no substitute for the real thing. The best parts of "Looper" are when Young Joe and Old Joe get to play off of each other. As Gordon-Levitt has to keep all the balls in the air, Willis gets the luxury of sliding in and being...Bruce Willis. With a gun and a one-liner, Willis can pretty much just do this role in his sleep. It's to his credit that he stays wide awake in the emotionally-driven scenes, not willing to just rest on his Willis-ness. Some nice supporting work from Dano, Emily Blunt, Garrett Dillahunt and Jeff Daniels (as Joe's grizzled boss, Abe) help to keep audiences invested, even as the film drastically changes tone from the first to the second half.
Inconsistencies and distractions aside, "Looper" is a fun twist on both the sci-fi and noir genres. It has plenty of visual candy to keep one from worrying about whether or not it all makes sense. It doesn't. But it's okay, it's just a movie. And a rather fun one at that.
