“LOOPER” My rating: C+ (Opens wide on Sept. 28)
118 minutes | MPAA rating: R
All time travel movies are brain teasers, raising questions about the time/space continuum, about the possibilities of changing the past (or the future).
But for a time travel movie to be truly memorable (I’m thinking of the first “Terminator,” “Somewhere in Time” or “Time After Time”) you’ve got to have more than a gnarly premise that makes your brain hurt.
You need characters to care about.
And that’s where Rian Johnson’s “Looper,” a futuristic blend of film noir and sci-fi, runs aground.
Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a looper, a unique variety of paid assassin.
In tough-guy voiceover narration Joe – speaking to us from the 2040s — explains that 30 years into his future (the 2070s) time travel will be perfected, but will be suppressed by the government. However, the mob in that future will get hold of the technology and use it to send their victims back in time.
There, in 2044, Joe or some other looper will be waiting in a Kansas cornfield. The victim, bound and hooded, will appear in a flash. The looper will shoot him, relieving the corpse of the silver ingots that are his payment for the hit. Meanwhile in the future, the criminals have no fear from the law, since a body never will be found.
Actually, that sounds like the least likely criminal enterprise involving time travel. Wouldn’t it make more sense for the crooks to make investments in 2044 that they know will pay off hugely in 30 years?
Whatever.
Our first glimpse of Gordon-Levitt, one of our best young actors, is disorienting. Because he doesn’t look like Joseph Gordon-Levitt. His eyebrows, nose and upper lip seem to have undergone some radical plastic surgery. (In fact, he looks like Daniel Craig’s little brother, dipped in wax.)
The bizzarro makeup is explained when Joe is told that his future, 60-year-old self is being sent back for execution. The older Joe is played by Bruce Willis, and the heavy makeup job is intended to make Gordon-Levitt look like a younger version of Willis.
Uh…ooookay.
Anyway, Joe’s hit on himself goes wrong, the older Joe takes off running and, like the original “Terminator,” goes looking for the 8-year-old boy who will grow up to be his criminal nemesis three decades hence. Kill the kid and Joe can save the woman he loved and lost in 2072.
This is the Cliff’s Notes version of “Looper.” Johnson’s convoluted script zags back and forth in time and is considerably more confusing.
Anyway young Joe, who is still obligated to kill his older self, takes shelter with a woman (Emily Blunt) whose 8-year-old son (a fairly amazing Pierce Gagnon) is on the old Joe’s hit list. And … well, you can probably tell where this is going.
“Looper” has been sumptuously produced with flawless f/x and a “Blade Runner”-ish sense of decay amid the high-tech wonders.
But it’s all about the twists and turns (or loops, if you will) of the narrative. We’re meant to slap our faces at the sheer awesomeness of Johnson’s quadruple-knotted vision.
And for a while, we do. There’s an in-your-face ruthlessness to Johnson’s storytelling, a visceral punch.
But ultimately we have to care about the characters and this is where “Looper” gets iffy.
For starters, Gordon-Levitt seems Botoxed…it’s hard for a genuine expression to make itself felt through the latex. Normally he’s the most affable and charismatic of performers, but here he looks like a department store mannequin.
Willis has a few nice moments to suggest that though his old Joe is on a justifiable mission, he’s having a hard time offing little boys. Blunt is always seriously watchable and offers just the right spin on a woman struggling with single motherhood and a particularly challenging child. And Jeff Daniels has a nice moment as a criminal mastermind sent from the future to run things in the present.
But Johnson cheats, I think, in creating a future in which a certain percentage of the population has a gene that gives them a limited form of telekenesis. It’s an element that the movie introduces, then ignores until late in the game when it becomes vital (too vital, I think) to the movie’s outcome.
I don’t dislike “Looper.” I just wish it didn’t feel so cobbled together from other movies and that, at the end of the day, it had some emotions to go along with its cool sleekness.
| Robert W. Butler
[…] young Bruce Willis in Looper was astounding. It even got to the point that some people thought that JGL had undergone plastic surgery for the role! But no, it was merely the fantastic work of Kazu […]