3 stars (out of four)
The premise of Looper
is the kind of big sci-fi concept that’s so good it carries the whole film. The
dense, knotty plot will appeal to puzzle-solvers who loved Inception and may well frustrate many others but the movie’s
success rests heavily on the degree to which you accept the following:
The year is 2044. Thirty years in the future (that is, in
2074) time travel is possible but has been outlawed. Ingeniously, the mob uses
it to carry out hits, sending victims back in time with a bag over their head.
They arrive in the past on their knees in a field, a warehouse, or somewhere
similarly out of the way, and are killed on the spot by “loopers,” for-hire
assassins wielding high-powered shotguns.
Loopers are paid well enough – for reasons never totally
clear to me, they are paid in slabs of solid silver – but have pretty bleak
contracts with their mob boss, Abe (Jeff Daniels). Termination of a looper’s
contract means termination of his life. He receives a handsome payout and enjoys
the next thirty years until a bag is thrown over his head and is transported
back in time to be killed by his younger self. Most loopers accept this
as a grim fact of their trade.
Word through the temporal grapevine, however, is that a new
mob kingpin in the future is ending the looper program. He’s closing all the
loops, so to speak, sending every looper into the past to their death whether
they’ve asked for an end to their contract or not.
Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt underneath some very convincing
makeup and prosthetics that provide continuity between the present and future)
is a looper. He enjoys the cavalier lifestyle associated with his work; he
takes narcotics through eye drops, goes to the club with his best pal (Paul
Dano) and has the standard Oedipal relationship with a prostitute (Piper
Perabo) that all brooding men in movies have. Imagine his surprise when one
day, on the job, his future self appears in the form of Bruce Willis – on his
knees to be killed but without a bag to hide his identity – and books it.
What does Present Joe do? If he doesn’t hunt down and kill
Future Joe, he’ll have to answer to Abe in the present day. If he can kill
Future Joe, he’ll at least be able to enjoy the next few decades, moral and
metaphysical trauma notwithstanding.
If all this sounds complicated, you’re right – it is. But Looper has a reassuringly flippant attitude toward its
mythology. During one confrontation between the two Joes at a diner, a
highlight of the film, the Bruce Willis iteration dismisses a logistical
question about the rules of time travel. They could sit there all day drawing
charts and diagrams, he says, but he doesn’t care about that. What matters is
the here and now, subjective though those concepts may be.
There is more to the film than I’ve mentioned but describing
it all would be difficult, not to mention spoil some surprises. For a while the
movie seems as though it will play out like a sci-fi variation on The
Fugitive, with Present and Future Joe
playing hunter and hunted, respectively. But a mid-film development invites
meditation on the age-old time travel question: Is it ethical to punish someone
for a crime they’ve yet to commit if it means preventing future tragedy? The
film’s center of gravity during this latter half shifts from Joe to a
remarkably precocious kid (Pierce Gagnon) and his tenacious mother (Emily
Blunt).
Personally, I prefer the movie’s setup to its payoff but
don’t let that discourage you from seeing it. Writer/director Rian Johnson’s
noir-tinged style (carried over partially from his debut, the highly stylized
and incredibly fun nostalgia binge Brick)
makes Looper addicting
entertainment. The script has wit and rhythm; the dialogue during the diner
scene crackles like water in a pan of hot oil. Joe has the charismatic appeal
of the classic Bogart antiheroes. (In a dry voiceover, he reveals that ten
percent of the population in 2044 has a telekinetic mutation. “Assholes
levitating quarters in bars to pick up girls,” he explains.)
Looper makes a
genuine effort to be Great Science Fiction, which is kind of thrilling to watch
even if it falls a bit short. The last act feels less sure of itself than what
precedes it (a barrage of bullets fired by Bruce Willis late in the film seems
to be from another movie entirely) but a great idea is still a great idea. With
any luck, Rian Johnson has a few more in store for us.
- Steve Avigliano, 10/9/12
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