Don't misunderstand, certainly Looper is a sci-fi action film, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis do play the younger and older version of the same character respectively, forced together via a convergence of thrilling time bending trickery. That much is explained, accurately, in the trailer. But the trailer only reveals a fraction of what the film is actually about. And it doesn't come close to demonstrating the depths of the creativity and craftsmanship at work which make Looper one of the years best.
In the future of our future, time travel has been invented. It is almost immediately outlawed, and only exists underground, covertly used by the crime syndicates controlling the vast, nameless, metropolis at the center of our story. Joe (Gordon-Levitt) is a looper, a specialized type of contract killer hired by the crime bosses of the future to kill and dispose of men sent back to their past, his present. These loopers are given an obscene amount of money for what they do, knowing full well that one day, when the crime bosses decide to terminate a particular contract, they'll have to "close their loop"--and kill the futuristic version of themselves as a means to sever all ties between timelines. The loopers are then left to live out their lives in style with temporarily fully-fulfilled futures for the next few decades, knowing one day they will be sent back in time to die.
More and more loops are being closed. When Joe's friend Seth (Paul Dano, playing the part with his skillful, peculiar and usual weirdness) fails to kill his future self and comes knocking, looking for protection, Joe is suddenly caught between duty to a friend and to the job. The conflict is but the starting point for setting a series of unfortunate events in motion. Counseled by old Abe (Jeff Daniels), a goon sent back from the future to oversee the loopers, who has built a nice little fiefdom for himself at the same time, Joe does what he's told is in his best interest and returns to work. But when his next job has him starring face to face with... his own, much older, face (Willis), what's Joe to do?
Well, it's a bit too awesome to spoil--in fact, I've merely scratched the surface with the plot of this film; uncovering the other details is part of the fun, which I don't want to spoil--although I will say that it eventually involves two single mothers, one a promiscuous prostitute (Piper Parabo), and the other a reformed city-dweller turned-protective-farm-house-livin'-and-shotgun-totin' momma (Emily Blunt), and a whole lot of other characters intertwined by many consciously-convoluted story-lines.
Written and directed by Johnson, whose two previous films--the low budget high-school-set neo-noir Brick (starring a younger Gordon-Levitt), and the comedic caper The Brothers Bloom, with Mark Ruffalo, Adrien Brody and Rachel Wiesz--gave us glimpses into the depths of his creative mind, pulls out all the stops here. And he gets two terrific performances from his two main actors (and, truthfully, the rest of his cast, too).
Willis is the best he's been in years (although he was similar great, in a totally different way, in the limited-release Wes Anderson coming-of-age comedy Moonrise Kingdom, which was also in theaters this year; but I sort of don't count that because most will be seeing it on video, if they see it at all). And Gordon-Levitt disappears into his role, sometimes not even sounding like or remotely resembling himself in any way. Of course, having his physical appearance altered via prosthetics and skillfully subtle face-morphing CGI to make him look more like Willis certainly has a hand in the transcendent transformation as well.
Looper is more than just a typical time-travel tale. It's many things at different times, and sometimes all things at once. It's a neo-noir, a gangster film (and a straight-up "gangsta" film, too; some of the baddies carry around these massive guns called Gats), an action-packed adventure... even a futuristic western. There's an element of the the supernatural at work, too. It's pulpy but kind of poetic, and constantly pulls the rug out from underneath you, preying on audience expectations, twisting and turning them in more directions than Johnson sometimes spins his roving camera. The director knows that his audience has seen a few dozen time-travel films, if not more, and that they understand the rules--be those Terminator, Back to the Future, 12 Monkey's or some other constructing principle--of the time travel genre. So, he simply doesn't play by them, and sometimes has his characters work directly against them.
Though outlandish in concept it may be, Looper is set in a wholly inventive universe that is both original and grounded in its own unique, believable, fully-realized reality. Time travel aside, one of the most futuristic and fantastical things about Looper's "present day" of the early-late 21st century are the factory-floor Fords and Chevys retrofit to run on solar energy--and that hover bike seen in all the press pics, too, I guess; but it's shown to be expensive and that it doesn't work particularly well, exactly like the improbable, impractical, futuristic toy it really is. And that's what sells it; that's what seals it. Looper is one of the years best films, an excellent entry into any of the half-dozen genres it mixes, and a sign that Johnson is a director not just to watch, and see what he does next, but to go out and see what he's done now.
Grade: 9/10
'Looper'
Written and directed by: Rian Johnson
Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis, Emily Blunt with Paul Dano, Noah Segan and Jeff Daniels
Rating: R
Runtime: 119 minutes
Studio / Distributor: TriStar Pictures / Sony
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