Looper

Looper is one of the most frustrating films I’ve seen in a good long while. Writer/director Rian Johnson (2005's Brick) cooks up a terrific sci-fi premise and takes the time to create and follow all the necessary rules and internal logic required for it to succeed brilliantly. But his execution of the movie's first half is so hamfisted you dismiss the picture long before it starts to get really REALLY good.

Looper takes place in the future, and it's not a difficult world to understand.  But rather than letting the audience follow Joe, the main character, through the early events in the story, learning as we go about this dystopia and what part Joe plays in it, Johnson has written pages and pages of voiceover narration in which Joe explains every single piece of information we need, leaving nothing for the audience to discover on our own. Not only are we never in the dark about anything, sometimes we are actually ahead of the characters themselves. What a missed opportunity! 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 real thought-provoking questions, but it’s very hard to care about any of this when you are being spoon-fed the narrative.

Another major complaint about this movie concerns star Joseph Gordon-Levitt: he just isn’t very good.  It's possible that he never was, but he's usually likeable enough that I don't notice. Here, though, he fails completely playing a young man who will eventually grow up to be Bruce Willis.  Donning prosthetics and aping some of Willis’s signature acting choices, he neither plays a young Willis convincingly nor seems a credible character in his own right. Although Willis is a limited actor who really only plays two character types—the wisecracking charmer and the still, quiet, always-thinking action hero—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 calibre; not even close.

But I still give Looper three stars because, long after I had written it off, the narrative took a sharp turn for the better: the setting moves from the city to a farm, and we meet Emily Blunt’s character.  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 audience is no longer ahead of the characters, and the film becomes much more like the cool but exciting movie we wanted it to be from the beginning. Looper’s third act is reminiscent of the second act of one of my all-time-favorite films, Peter Weir’s Witness from 1985, and its finale is one of the more satisfying time-travel endings I’ve ever seen. Looper is also one of the best-looking modestly-budgeted sci-fi films since 1997’s Gattica.

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, but in the end 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 film a commercial and critical success. These days audiences really want to be spoon-fed their stories or they start to bitch about how confusing a film is. I fear if the terrific movie this could have been (and might have been, had it been made any time between 1970 and 1999 by another director) would have demanded too much of today's moviegoer.  I can’t be positive, but I’m pretty sure that's the case; 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.