FILM REVIEW: LOOPER

LOOPER (15) 
Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis, Emily Blunt, Piper Perabo, Han Soto, Jeff Daniels

Director: Rian Johnson

Running Time: 118 minutes

Released Out Now

It's 2042 and Joe (Joseph Gordon Levitt) makes his shady career as a Looper. Thirty years down the line (in 2072), time-travel has been discovered but immediately outlawed. That hasn't stopped the futuristic hoodlums taking advantage. Now when they kill someone, they can sidestep the DNA, tracking and ID problems by whoooshing their victim back in time and having him killed there by said 'Looper' agents. Thus, their enemies are disposed of with nary a trace in their own time-frame.

Loopers are rewarded handsomely for their services, living a life of luxury and privilege from the employer (represented by sent-back middle-management bad guy Abe - played by The Newsroom's Jeff Daniels) but knowing that one day their 'loop' will be closed when the future catches up with them and they become a victim of the process themselves).  However the loyal Joe is compromised when his next target escapes the immediate kill-zone... a bigger problem that said target is his older self (Willis).  At first Young Joe is more than happy to kill his older self  (figuring he can change his destiny) and win back the trust of Abe and his gang, but as time progresses and he learns more about the future that Old Joe has escaped and why he's come back, it becomes clear that the choices he'll have to make could impact not just his own destiny but that of the wider world...

There's the old saying that that there are but a handful of stories in Hollywood and each movie is merely a variation on one of those themes. That's possibly even more true for the science-fiction genre which all too often falls back upon ideas and plot-lines that we've seen many times before. As for the sub-section labelled 'time-travel'... well don't even have got me started (so to speak).

Intelligent time-travel stories are even rarer still. Most entries, while happy to throw a few special-effects and a dystopian future into their tales, wouldn't know an actual 'paradox' if it came up and kicked them in their event horizon.  So seeing the trailers for Looper over the last few months, one could be forgiven for thinking  that a film starring Bruce Willis and a lot of shooting wouldn't necessarily be the poster-boy for complex temporal manoeuvring.

Levitt, with subtle make-up to make him look like a young Willis, is excellent in the main role, playing the conflicted agent who was reasonably happy with his flawed by comfortable immoral life but now finds himself shoved into a genuine crisis of faith and moral quandry. It's a role that requires some physicality and some internalising and he does both well.  Yes, Willis as the more weathered, older Joe, does provide the main muscle of the piece. While Levitt handles a number of action-scenes very well, it's Willis who, not unexpectedly, juggernauts through the more familiar ground of taking on the bad guys with his fists and bullets. But one does need to remember that Willis, action icon that he still is, isn't above taking some steps off the beaten path. He's gone timey-whimey on us before with the likes of Twelve Monkeys and in many ways this feels like a more commerical, less abstract variant on that, rather than the more obvious touchstones of  Back to the Future, Terminator and even The Time-Traveller's Wife.

While Looper has some familiar questions to ask about the nature of time-travel and the nature of cause and effect, it admirably doesn't play out all of its cards in too obvious a way. It challenges its audience to second-guess where it's heading and offers some nice red-herrings along the way, but it will be hard for the average cinema-goer to claim they knew what was coming around every such corner.  Yes, as with any time-travel story, there are what could be constituted as plot-holes or conveniences and Looper does have some flaws and required leaps-of-faith, but if you take the basic premise and set-up as a given, the ambitious and challenging story that plays out on that canvas works pretty well, while not ignoring the very questions the audience are bound to have asked.

It might be tempting fate, rather than destiny, to place Looper in the higher eschilons of sci-fi that hold the likes of  the timeless Blade Runner, Terminator  and Aliens, but this latest film does punch well above its weight and expectations... and the result is a film that arguably packs too many ideas into its running-time rather than too few.  Director Rian Johnson, who also wrote the screenplay, has provided a story worthy of a Philip K Dick project and that's karmaic kudos in itself.

In short, as the summer blockbusters make way for the more cerebral movies of the autumn, this is a film that strides both camps with an air of confidence. A time-travelling thriller that doesn't leave you with a sense of too much deja-vu. Who will have thunk it?

5/5