There was a moment during director Rian
Johnson's sci-fi thriller 'Looper', that moment being when
Young Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Old Joe (Bruce Willis)
were having their chat at the diner that I was thinking that
'Looper' is on the verge of being the best movie I've ever
seen. At that moment this movie was just that
good. Now as the movie went on, for me personally,
'Looper' didn't maintain that same level of awe that it had me
in, for a number of reasons, but 'Looper' in the final
analysis was still a darn good movie.
In a not too distant future from ours, Young Joe will inform
us that in this not-too-distant future time travel will become
a reality, though it's highly illegal. Right now this
time travel is only being used by highly organized criminal
syndicates who are using this completely awesome tech for the
mundane task of having their enemies killed, since disposing
of bodies is damn near impossible in the 2070's, this task
being handled by Loopers, such as young Joe, who shoots these
cowled time travelers and then casually disposes of these
bodies for some reward.
Every once in a while a Looper has the task of killing their
future self, called closing the loop or getting rid of loose
ends in the future, and these Loopers seem to be pretty cool
with this. The alternative is letting the loop run
which… well… you don't really want to do because we've seen
what happens to a Looper that allows his loop to run.
It's not pretty.
As you have probably already seen in
the trailer, Old Joe is sent back on that tarp to get taken
out by Young Joe, but something strange happened in the future
to Old Joe which made for a different kind of murder
experience for Young Joe. In short, Old Joe
escapes and Old Joe needs to correct some
things in his past to make things right for his present… which
is Young Joe's future. It would be really helpful for
Old Joe if Young Joe would just take his advice and get out of
town because anything that happens to Young Joe will also
happen to Old Joe, but Young Joe really wants Old Joe dead so
he can have his present back. Got me? And Old Joe
running around doing stuff has serious ramifications for the
future and such the Boss Man (Jeff Daniels), who happens to be
from the future, has every available man with a gun looking
for Old Joe. Young Joe has to be found too, but Old Joe
will mess some stuff up if he isn't found and soon.
Old Joe has plan, something to do with a supremely evil
mobster in his day called The Rainmaker, a hot chick that runs
a farm (Emily Blunt) and her bratty four year old (Pierce
Gagnon) and it's Old Joe's plan that tosses this movie into
some familiar territory and as such stops it from being a
great as I was thinking it was going to be.
Nonetheless, Old Joe has a plan and Young Joe is stuck in the
middle of this plan with some really, truly difficult
decisions lying at his feet. And the movie is kind of
awesome again.
Every once in a while, Rian Johnson writes and directs a movie
and when this happens we are fairly confident that we are
going to have a good day. The high school mystery
'Brick' was a good day, the adventure con 'The Brothers Bloom'
was also a good day and to the surprise of no one, sitting
through the 'Looper' was a good day. Why was 'Looper' so
good? For one it is written so smartly and so cleverly
and Johnson handles the conundrum that is time travel with wit
and panache. Time travel is strange, conceptually
speaking, because while it doesn't exist there are still
certain things about it which have to make sense in our brains
for us to accept the implausibility of it and 'Looper' does a
really great job of bringing it all together. The story
doesn't get caught up in the minutiae of it all, thank
goodness, just the larger concepts of time travel, the
individual effects, the ripple effects, the probabilities and
the possibilities. There are some issues I had, but it
was more with the reasoning than with concepts. Using
time travel to clear up loose ends seems somewhat of a waste,
and you have to admire a criminal organization that has the
intellect to care about the ramifications of paradox
events. I'm thinking most criminals could care
less. And why does the Looper have to kill these people
who get transported thirty years in the past? Unless of
course a dead body can't time travel. This also leads me
to another thought, that being if dead bodies in the future
are hard to explain off, then missing people are easy to
explain off? What a strange time the 2070's will be.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis were great together,
also doing a fairly decent job on selling us that were a
variation of the same person, even though they couldn't look
more different if they tried. The futuristic setting was
still plausibly realistic, the movie did have traditional
action in the form of car crashes and shooting and fighting
and chase scenes and what not, but even when we were simply
listening to dialog, there was still a sense of excitement in
the air because the film was so well scripted.
As we mentioned earlier there was a lull in the middle in
which the film lost its sense of originality, falling into a
more familiar territory and almost felt like the film fell
into a bit of a rut, but I imagine we had to get from one
point to another and this was the best way to get there,
without us giving anything away.
But aside from that, 'Looper' is the best kind of movie.
An action film with a brain. That's opposed to a stupid
action movie… some of which we also love, or a really smart
movie that's boring. Which we don't love quite as
much. That's like a supermodel who can cook. Rare
and appreciated.
