Looper

One of the most frustrating films I've seen in a good long while. Writer/director Rian Johnson follows up his gimmicky film-noir-but-at-highschool movie Brick (2005) and his kooky con-man caper The Brothers Bloom (2008) with what at first seems like it will be one of those tedious Blade-Runner-wannabe futuristic tech-noirs. Movies of this ilk, from 12 Monkeys and Minority Report to Dark City and Johnny Mnemonic, leave me pretty cold as they're always more concerned with world-building than storytelling. Looper certainly starts out that way. Johnson has cooked up a terrific sci-fi premise and taken the time to create and follow all the necessary rules and internal logic required for it to succeed brilliantly, but his extinction of the first act is so hamfisted I dismissed the picture long before it started to get good. But it does get good.

The film is set in the future of Kansas City in 2044. It's not a difficult future to understand. But rather than allowing the audience to follow the main character, Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), through the early events in the story, learning as we go about this dystopia and what part Joe plays in it, Johnson has written what feels like pages of voiceover narration in which Joe explains every single piece of information we need to know. Joe tells us that thirty years in his future, time travel will be invented and quickly outlawed, only to be used by a crime syndicate to send its enemies back to 2044 for paid assassins called "loopers" to execute and dispose of the bodies before the sophisticated tracking systems of 2074 come into use.

It's a cool premise with clever ramifications for the loopers' careers and life expectancy. But all this gets explained with a banal voice-over, leaving nothing for the audience to discover on our own. The actors are stranded for the first thirty minutes with nothing to play but attitude and redundant exposition disconnected from an engaging narrative. We are never in the dark about anything and are often ahead of the characters themselves as we sit through several terrible scenes with a tediously exasperated Paul Dano as Joe's friend, Seth, a fellow looper who has failed to "close his loop," and some dull table-setting-of-an-already-loaded table scenes with the manager of the Loopers, Jeff Daniels. What a missed opportunity! We could be riveted, trying to make sense of what these characters are so worked up about instead of just staring at the generic dark, tech-noir cityscape and puzzling over Joseph Gordon-Levitt's bizarre appearance and acting choices while we wait for something interesting to happen.

It is so rare to see a sci-fi film that works on even the most basic levels these days, let alone one that poses thought-provoking questions. Looper could have been one of these, but it's hard to care about anything when you are being spoon-fed a narrative. Another major complaint about this movie concerns its star. Joseph Gordon-Levitt just isn't a very good actor. It's possible that he never was, but he's usually likable enough that I haven't noticed. Here, though, he fails completely at playing a young man who will eventually grow up to be Bruce Willis. Donning prosthetics and aping some of Willis's signature head moves and line deliveries, JG-L neither plays a young Willis convincingly nor seems a credible character in his own right. He alternatively looks like a guy wearing some kind of James Dean mask and a kid made up to look like John Travolta. Worse, his high, reedy voice sounds nothing like Willis's soft but gravelly baritone. While Willis may be a limited actor who only plays two character types—the wisecracking charmer and the still, quiet, always-thinking tough guy—he's a tremendously entertaining star who can deliver the two roles in his range better than anyone else. Gordon-Levitt just isn't a star of that caliber, not even close. Joe struts his way through his existence as a futuristic hitman, spending his looper money on vintage cloaths, club drugs ingested through eyedrops, and his sex-worker girlfriend (Piper Perabo, in a role that I'm sure had some reason to exist in the screenplay, but sure doesn't in the film).

Though it happens long after any discerning viewer has written Looper off, the narrative takes a sharp turn for the better after the two stars have a face-to-face conversation. The setting moves from the city to a farm, and we meet Emily Blunt's character, Sara. The fact that Blunt is the brightest and best young actress working these days isn't what improves matters—though it certainly doesn't hurt. What makes the last third become riveting all of a sudden is that we finally get a chance to think for ourselves. The pace slows way down, the voice-over goes away, the stakes and themes are finally established, the audience is no longer ahead of the characters, and the film becomes much more like the cool, exciting movie we wanted it to be from the beginning. Loopers's third act is reminiscent of the climax of one of my all-time favorite films, Peter Weir's Witness (1985), and the finale is one of the more satisfying time-travel endings I've ever seen.

Time-travel movies live or die on how well they stick to their own rules. Looper succeeds on that point and has other qualities to recommend it. Still, I have to give it a mixed review. The most disappointing thing about the film's missteps is that they are probably the very things that made this relatively low-budget picture a commercial and critical success. These days audiences seem to want their stories spoon-fed to them, or they start to bitch about how confusing a film is. I fear that the terrific movie this could have been (and might have been, had it been made any time between 1970 and 1997 by another director) would have demanded too much of today's moviegoer—which makes the picture even more depressing. In this age of instant remakes, perhaps someday we can travel to a time when this disappointing film has been remade into a great one.