After talking with writer/director Rian Johnson last week about “Looper,” I went in expecting greatness and wasn’t disappointed. “Looper” was everything Johnson claimed it would be, and more. I could start a rant here about how it renews faith in films produced outside of major studios and overcomes the stereotype that original content in movies is dying in an age where sequels and re-makes are prevailing, but I won’t. I don’t feel like sounding pretentious, and you probably don’t want to read a bunch of pretentious babble. Not that I’m assuming I know what you want. That would be rather pretentious of me.
But enough about me, this column is supposed to be like 67 percent about movies. The other 33 percent is reserved for cat metaphors, in case there’s ever a good time to make every third sentence a cat metaphor.
But back to talking about “Looper.” The concept of time travel is always difficult to handle in any type of fiction, as it seems to always carry a different set of rules and restrictions in each story it’s present in. Johnson did an amazing job by creating a clear set of rules that audiences could understand without spending too much time explaining the concept, and he managed to do most of the exposition through potentially the most gruesome scene in the movie, which brings up another good point.
“Looper” is an incredibly dark movie in parts. As with many sci-fi movies set in distant dystopian societies, the usual prevalence of crime, drugs and prostitution exists. The main character, Joe (younger version played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, older version played by Bruce Willis) is a looper, an assassin tasked with killing targets who are sent back from the future and disposing of their bodies in exchange for bars of silver. Every looper eventually has to kill the 30-years-older version of them, literally making their lives an endless loop through different threads of time (for the movie to work, you needed to assume an endless number of threads of time that will continue in the same pattern unless something comes back and changes it).
Pretty dark stuff, not to spoil what Willis’ character ultimately ends up doing, but there are parts that may be very hard to watch.
One of Johnson’s hardest tasks was making the two characters seem like younger or older versions of the other one. As he said in the interview last week (shameless plug for my own column), Johnson wrote the part of younger Joe specifically for Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and later chose Bruce Willis for his “Bruce Willisiness.” When Johnson claimed Gordon-Levitt had learned some of Bruce’s mannerisms and speech patterns, I assumed he would just occasionally say something I could imagine Bruce Willis saying. Gordon-Levitt went way deeper than that, showing once again why he is one of the most sought-after young actors. He captured and mimicked even the most minuscule little things Willis does. His smile, his squint, his posture, everything–Gordon-Levitt had them all. Add in a nose and brow job from the make-up department, and it felt like watching a younger version of Willis, truly impressive stuff.
“Looper” takes you on an emotional roller-coaster ride. Each character (especially the two versions of Joe) had an incredible amount of depth. Characters with directly conflicting goals have compelling reasons to succeed, but also reasons why they should fail. Tough moral questions reside behind the entire plot, ones that need to be answered to decide which character to be sympathetic towards. Even the supporting cast, consisting of the handler from the future, Abe (Jeff Daniels) and fellow loopers, Seth (Paul Dano) and Kid Blue (Noah Segan), have well-played performances of compelling supporting characters.
Honestly, there aren’t too many gripes to be had about “Looper.” The plot may confuse some at times, especially if you get up for a quick soda and a bathroom break at the wrong time, but generally the story isn’t too hard to follow if you make an active attempt to follow it. “Looper” definitely calls for a re-watch to catch some of the more delicately placed details you might not catch the first time.
Overall, “Looper” gets 4 1/2 mildly confusing threads of time out of five. It is definitely a movie worth seeing this weekend if you have the time to kill, and possibly one that might come up again during Oscar season in the original screenplay category.
