It's time for an overdue review! Where I talk about stuff that was relevant at least three weeks ago. Gives the brain time to simmer.
Looper is an ... interesting film. It’s definitely a good film -- three out of four stars, pushing to 3.5 if you’re in the right mood -- but it’s not necessarily one I want to see again. Which, for a movie with a twisty timey-wimey premise, could be considered a downside. And it isn’t that I found any obvious problems or glaring plot holes (you may disagree; I’ll address the issue later); it’s that the movie is incredibly dark and pretty dang depressing. Again, it’s well-made, and there’s no question that’s the tone they were going for. But when I say it gets dark, I mean it gets dark.
The movie starts by introducing us to the world of the loopers: contract assassins who only deal in one kind of kill. Joseph Gordon Levitt plays a looper named Joe, who explains in voice-over that while time travel hasn’t been invented yet (“yet” meaning the 2040s), it will be a few decades hence (the 2070s). It’s immediately banned, but of course organized crime sees an opportunity and takes it. Future policework has gotten so good that when the mob needs someone disappeared, they can’t just kill them. They’re guaranteed to get caught. So, instead, they tie up the poor soul, bag his head, strap four silver bars to his back and send him back in time. He appears at a designated time and place, the waiting looper blows him away with a blunderbuss (a crude shotgun on cheap steroids), the looper disposes of the body, and the silver gets turned into cash (which the looper will then turn into drugs and hookers and rent, but mostly drugs and hookers). The catch is that eventually, the sucker with his head in the bag will be carrying not silver, but gold -- which means the young man with the gun has just killed his future self and received his final payment. They call this “closing the loop”, it’s written into their contracts, and everybody involved tries not to think too hard about the ramifications.
All this is revealed in the trailer, so they get it out of the way pretty quickly. We see Joe go about his daily business of killing people, taking drugs and falling in love with a hooker. Among other things, he deals with his boss, Abe, a mob higher-up from the future sent back to run the city in the past. He’s doing a bang-up job of it, too. Incidentally, he’s the only character in the “present” scenes who has any real fat on him, which I thought was a nice touch. Everyone else, with the exception of a few muscular bruiser types, is lean to the point of being thin -- and not diet-thin, but barely-getting-enough-to-eat thin. Coupled with the crapsack city environment and other background details (cars, vagrants and the like), it really drives home what a horrible time most people have of it. Yay, future!
Anyway, Joe notices that in his circle of friends/colleagues/drinking buddies, loops are being closed at an alarming rate. There’s a rumor as to why, but no one has any concrete proof -- and nobody cares. They’re all too busy whooping it up with their big paydays. And then one of Joe’s friends fails to close his loop -- he literally lets himself get away. This Doesn’t End Well -- in fact, it’s one of the most viscerally disturbing things I’ve ever seen on film. It literally tainted the rest of the movie for me, which is why I qualified my star rating at the beginning. Worth noting, however, is that despite the horrific violence of the scene, there is literally no gore. I won’t spoil how they pull this off, because objectively speaking, it’s a very impressive and very powerful scene. But it gave me the willies something fierce and stuck with me for several days, so if I rent the DVD I will fast-forward through it with no regrets.
The story eventually gets back to Joe standing out in a field with his blunderbuss, waiting for his next assignment to show up. The assignment, of course, is him from 30 years in the future (played by Bruce Willis). Old!Joe, however, is not bound and bagged, and gets the jump on Young!Joe when he hesitates. Young!Joe wakes up, realizes he’s in deep trouble, and proceeds with most of the action we saw in the trailers: Running around, shooting at things, screaming that he’ll fix things. However, this only takes us up to about the halfway point of the story.
The entire second half of Looper takes an unexpected turn that I won’t even begin to spoil because the afore-mentioned timey-wimey pretty well plot depends on the viewer going in blind the first time around. I can tell you that the shift in tone and pacing plays well with the increasingly unsettling nature of the central conflict and the choices Joe finds himself making, both as his young and old self. In addition, several details mentioned in passing in Act I are thrust to the foreground in Act II, displacing much of what had previously taken center stage. This is nicely highlighted by a change in location and the introduction of several new characters as the story splits to follow both Old and Young Joe.
Genre savvy viewers, or even just those who paid attention to the story structure module in English class, will likely think they know where the story is going by about the two-thirds mark, but this isn’t a bad thing. Much of the suspense comes from having a pretty good idea what’s coming next, but having absolutely no clue how, why or when it’s going to play out. The big questions don’t get answered until the very end, and when they do -- despite the foreshadowing and the almost inevitable demands of genre -- it’s a gut punch. (If you’ve seen the movie, no pun intended.) The ending also appears to raise some questions about the effects of present actions on future events, but I think it holds up under examination. (It also helps to explain/is explained by a few of the earlier scenes, which is a plus.)
I liked Looper. Despite the incredibly squicky scene I mentioned earlier (seriously, I’ve got the rolling heebies right now just thinking about it), it’s a solid noir-ish near-future thriller that mixes hard action with low-key sensibilities. Also, there’s almost no way they could exploit it with a flashy big-budget sequel, and how often do those come along these days? It doesn’t hit you over the head every two minutes with noise and special effects, it takes the time to let the audience appreciate the story, and yet it keeps moving fast enough -- even in the slow scenes -- that the viewer stays invested. Watching Young!Joe try to figure out how to put his life back together is a little like watching someone learn algebra: They just want to learn what they need for the test, but the concepts behind the problems eventually start to sneak in and make a difference in how he looks at the world. Likewise, Old!Joe’s struggle with his self-appointed mission and the experience of living alongside his younger self is very interesting. Although he gets less screen time, he makes the most of it.
So, final verdict? Three out of four stars, same as I said at the beginning. As always, your mileage may vary, but I liked it. It just took me a month to figure out why.
P.S. The makeup really is incredible.
