Looper – Review

Looper is the type of movie you instantly get excited about from the moment you watch the first trailer.  You could call this film Rian Johnson’s baby as he wrote and directed it.  He is quite the up and comer as this seems to be only the third film he’s been heavily involved with and it appears to have all the makings of a hit.  It’s got Bruce Willis.  It’s got Joseph Gordon-Levitt.  It also stars Jeff Daniels and Emily Blunt.  It takes place in the future.  It’s got time travel.  What else could you ask for?  While films can often fail to live up to their potential, Looper looked like it could be the real deal.

Looper takes place about 30 years in the future where the United States has been trending downward.  Time travel has not yet been invented but it will be in another 30 years (60 years from the present time).  The story goes that time travel is quickly banned after it’s invention for obvious reasons.  However, time travel becomes very useful for large criminal organizations because tracking technology has made it virtually impossible to dispose of bodies.  So, the criminal organizations hatch a plan where they will send the people they want dead back in time (to about 30 years from now) where they will be killed and disposed of by someone known as a looper.

These loopers are paid well and there is only one string attached.  The criminal organizations do not want loose ends roaming around indefinitely and so if the looper lives 30 more years to be alive when the criminal organization is around, then the criminal organization will send the old looper back in time to be killed by his younger self.  This is known as “closing your loop” and results in a large payout and a forced retirement.  So in essence you do some dirty work and retire early with lots of money, but you know that in the future you will be killed by your younger self.  You can see what kind of problems this could bring up.

Luckily, the film manages to do most things right.  Joseph Gordon-Levitt is almost unrecognizable compared to his previous roles but performs marvelously.  Bruce Willis is the perfect choice for the older version of Gordon-Levitt.  He does a fantastic job of portraying the wiser and more experienced version of the same character.  The performance of everyone is very good with the exception of the Gat Men.  The Gat Men are the hired guns who make sure the loopers stay in line.  For some reason, even when the whole rest of the world is so full of character, the Gat Men are a disaster.  They are mindless, lack any sort of personality, and even dress in a ridiculous fashion.  The closest thing to the Gat Men I can think of would be the hordes of mindless and bizarre looking minions found in low grade comic books.

Looper, to its credit, intentionally tries to distance itself from complicated graphs and charts trying to explain how all the time travel works out.  It’s not that things don’t make sense, because they do.  It’s just that the emphasis is on what’s happening instead of how it’s all happening.  This allows the viewer to really get sucked into the excitement and just enjoy what’s going on.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with the more detailed and explanatory approach to time travel, but it would not have fit well in this case because Looper is much more a character driven film rather than a science driven film.

You can tell that a lot of effort was put into this film by it’s writer and director Rian Johnson.  The best evidence of this is that Looper is the type of film where everything exists and happens for a reason.  All of the early lead-up and all the breaks between the action could initially be thought of as unimportant.  That would be wrong.  All the little details you see are important, and matter, and Looper is better as a result.  Seeing how everything is brought together in the end provides a great sense of satisfaction.

Films that deal with time travel and the future are very easy to screw up.  Though not perfect, Looper is exciting and intricate in ways that keep you on the edge of your seat during the film and keep you talking about it after it ends.