In the future, time travel has been discovered. And outlawed. Instead of using it exclusively to go back in time and draw inappropriate pictures on Hitler's face while he's sleeping, the world's future criminal organizations use time travel as a way to kill people. Because it's super hard to hide a body in the future or something. So they send people they want dead back to about 50 years from our present to be killed.
The guys who do the killing are called loopers. They wait at a predetermined position, use a shotgun like gun called a blunderbuss to blow away a recently time traveled hooded target, and collect their payment in the form of silver sent back with the target. Then they dispose of the body, usually with fire. But there's a catch that comes in the form of the phrase "closing the loop." To erase all knowledge of this operation loopers have thirty years of life given to them, at the end of thirty years they are sent back in time to be killed by themselves. For an extra reward the young self is given a large amount of gold to compensate for killing himself. The only rule is never let your target go free.
Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, see what they did there?) is a looper. He waits in a cornfield, checks his pocket watch and carefully aims his blunderbuss. A white sheet is spread out in front of him. A man appears. Boom. In an instant he is blown away. There is no thinking, just acting. But one day after watching multiple loopers close their own loops, a man appears on his sheet but this time he isn't wearing a hood. The split second that Joe hesitates allows Old Joe (Bruce Willis) to escape, the one thing you're not allowed to let happen. Now Joe has to hunt himself down.
Sounds like a sci-fi chase action film right? Wrong. What the trailer doesn't reveal is about half of the story line. And I was very pleased with that. There is nothing quite like assuming you know what a movie will be about and then watching it take a complete right turn. Rian Johnson has thrown together, at minimum, at least 2 separate movies. Normally this would be a confusing experience, and at some points it is, but he keeps it all together for a satisfying sci-fi flick.
I had a real debate with a friend about the merits of this film. He thought some of the emotional moments were cheapened by the fact that they were forced to happen. I would half agree, but it doesn't make them less emotional for me and for most audience members. There are hard choices here. Some of them gory. There were many times where I stared at the screen slack jawed or quietly whispering to the man next to me "oh no."
Because for sheer entertainment value, "Looper" is hard to beat. Close range shotgun blasts are brutal, Levitt and Willis are fantastic at acting, and Johnson has created a believable world very much informed by past sci fi movies but unique in itself.
Sure there are some poor cheesy choices. And if anyone takes the time to actually think about the time travel stuff it would all fall apart, kind of like how "Inception" loses itself after multiple viewings. The final scene with Levitt is a mishmash of ridiculousness. This is his actual line, "And I saw it, a boy and a man, trapped forever making the same choices, stuck in a circle." LIKE A LOOP JOSEPH GORDON-LEVITT? LIKE A GIANT LOOP? JUST SAY IT, IF YOU'RE GOING TO DESCRIBE THE TITLE JUST SAY IT. Also, for anyone who saw the movie, Joe had about 20 different options to pick before choosing what he did. But instead he was like eh, all or nothing right?
But is "Looper" good? I honestly have no idea. And I saw it 3 weeks ago. But I loved watching it and I would certainly watch it again. If just to see Bruce Willis dual wield machine guns.
3 out of 4 stars
-Christopher O'Connell
P.S. Did anyone else get a Walking Dead vibe as soon as Joe got to the farm? Thankfully it wasn't nearly as long or as boring.
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