Looper

Written and directed by Rian Johnson. Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Joe), Bruce Willis (Old Joe) and Emily Blunt (Sara).

Bottom line: Great action, funny little jokes, cool style and attitude make Looper a solid sci-fi movie.

3/4

The Gordon-Levitt voice over lays out the scene: criminals from the future send people back in time to be killed by hit men called loopers. We meet Joe (Gordon-Levitt). He is a looper and has a particular routine. He wakes up to do the hit late morning. He practices French, has lunch at a diner with coffee with milk, disposes of the body, exchanges his payment of silver for cash and then finds his way to a strip club with his looper friends to do some drugs. All this changes, as you may know from the trailer, when his target turns out to be himself from the future. We learn about why he is sent back and his plans shortly thereafter. I won’t go into much more detail so I don’t spoil anything, not that you necessarily go to Looper for the plot. It isn’t that it is terrible but the goodness comes from the overall package. The casting, to start with, is the strongest part of the film.

Bruce Willis is a perfect Old Joe. He is a violent, worldly, and determined man. When he is on a mission, he doesn’t mess around until the job is done. So, really, Bruce Willis is playing the same character as always but in this case he is a hit man instead of a detective. I am a big fan of him so it’s fine with me.

Gordon-Levitt is a tried and true punkie kid and he doesn’t fail in Looper. The nature of Joe is something I liked about this movie; he goes to a field at a certain time with his blunderbuss to shoot a bound and blind folded person. It isn’t like he is the best Looper ever or the first Looper, he was just some street urchin who they picked up. With the blunderbuss, for example, in the words of the Kid in Blue, “You can’t hit anything outside of fifteen yards and you can’t miss anything within that.”

His young-Bruce-Willis makeup is pretty good too. There is one scene in which Joe and a mobster are speaking. It seems to exist only to highlight Gordon-Levitt’s Bruce Willis impression; just make your eye little frown faces and purse your lips.

Sequences like that give the movie a really relaxed tone. When Joe and Old Joe meet for the first time, for example, Old Joe says, “Just shut up about the time travel stuff. We’ll start drawing up charts and diagrams and we’ll be here all day.” The movie has to take a lax stance on that and itself because, in part, there are too many issues to address. The protocol as previously mentioned: people sent alive to an empty field to be killed by one guy, at some point their target is their future self. That scenario right there is so full of holes it might as well have been shot by a blunderbuss. Couldn’t they kill the person first and then send the body back in time or transport them into a furnace or have them killed by several people? Time travel is a slippery slope, sure, but giving some thought to the scenario is the type of thing which distinguishes a corny action movie from a great, memorable sci-fi movie. That said; this is a corny action movie. It has a similar feel to The Rock (starring Sean Connery and Nicholas Cage). 

I believe I talked about this chill type of attitude in an earlier review. It is the type of situation where the movie is a little stupid but it’s ok because it is a movie, so it is allowed some leeway and it will take care of the loose ends. I like this type of situation as long as I know the movie is on board too. That is, I know that it isn’t trying to convince that it is cinematic gold. After all, there is a difference between going for a ride and being taken for a ride. Fortunately, Looper falls in the former category.

Another pleasant surprise is Sara (Emily Blunt) and her son, Cid (Pierce Gagnon). I usually hate kids in movies. I especially hate them action movies because too often they are a cop out in the suspense department. Throw a crying, innocent little kid to a situation and then it gets that much more intense, right? No way, not for me. I get frustrated for the protagonist. He or she already has enough on his or her plate without some crying little urchin. I was happy here because Cid is a creepily intelligent and capable kid (and it actually gets a little scary at one point). For example, Sara and Joe need to figure a way to communicate so Cid refurbishes one of his old toys to work as Morse code type of device. He holds reasonable conversations too. He is not used as a little suspense machine. I liked Sara too for similar reasons. She can take care of herself and her son and even Joe. She is a character far removed from the gratuitous nudity that is Suzie (Piper Perabo) (Joe’s girlfriend before he meets Sara).

The special effects were pleasant. Instead of an elaborate warping effect for time travel, it is a simple cut; one frame the person is not there, the next, the person is. Sometimes in sci-fi movies there is a preoccupation with the futuristic technologies and I was pleasantly surprised to see that Looper avoided such a plague. There is a hover bike but it doesn’t dominate the situation. At one point, Old Joe uses a keyboard-less computer and the camera hangs a little too long on the gadget but it is relatively brief. The fashion and art style are pleasantly ordinary: simple, sharp looking ties and suits.

Overall, I’d give this movie thumbs up and recommend it. It was a relaxed, fun, cool action sci-fi movie.