Movie review: 'Looper' leaves no loopholes

Spoiler alert.

I don’t need a time machine to tell you that Looper will be regarded as one of the most memorable science-fiction films of our time.

It is an intelligent film about time-travel, knitted around a powerful message of love and sacrifice, with a flourishing finish to boot; a surprise ending that left many in the audience in my cinema theatre standing and applauding.

The film is set mostly in the year 2044, in a future where criminal organisations are left dominant because of an economic meltdown. Here, writer/director Rian Johnson manages to paint a futuristic universe without overindulging in the sci-fi. He successfully creates a future that is believable enough to draw us into its reality; elements like weapon technology, vehicles, fashion, architecture, and the like, all feel like an evolution rather than a revolution of our present-day selves. Even the fantastical elements come across as natural; the few citizens in Looper who have the ability to use telekinesis are mostly limited to small levitation tricks rather than fully blown psychic abilities.

Looper’s narrative is just as engaging, with endearing characters that draw you in as you witness their personal growth. The film stars Bruce Willis as Joe and Jason Gordon-Levitt as a younger Joe. The older Joe lives in 2074, a period where time-travel has recently been discovered and outlawed, though not before criminal organisations managed to secure the powerful technology. It is a time when tracking devices have made it impossible for the felonious to dispose of corpses undetected by the law, so those of the organised crime have come up with a simple solution: send victims back in time to be assassinated.

Younger Joe is one such assassin who, along with a group of other assassins, lives in 2044 and is called a ‘looper’. When younger Joe is assigned with a hit, he simply waits at an abandoned field at a specified time with a gun, a clean white sheet, and other items designed to aid him in murder and body disposal. Younger Joe, like the other loopers, is hired on an understanding that when his contract with the mafia is complete, his older self will be sent back to be killed by him as the final hit, along with a ‘golden handshake’, and thus leaving no loopholes.

When older Joe finally appears in 2044, younger Joe expects an easy kill but is taken unawares by the older man who has come unbounded and on his own. Eventually, and in what is the most touching scene of the film, older Joe explains to younger Joe why it is so important for younger Joe to continue his future unchanged and how the power of love will help him grow past his sickeningly decadent lifestyle.

At this point we even learn of a mysterious new mob boss, simply called ‘Rainmaker’, who is extremely powerful and has singlehandedly started to take over all the criminal organisations in 2074. Here, we learn why older Joe has come back to 2044 — to hunt the Rainmaker at a time when he was a young boy — and we note the startling things older Joe is willing to do to protect the one he loves. Naturally, younger Joe opposes him, although younger Joe’s motives change drastically for his defiance of older Joe.

Where the film falters is in the fact that Looper doesn’t quite successfully sell both Joes as the same person. Although Bruce Willis is fantastic in some emotional scenes, and Jason Gordon-Levitt has enough make-up on him to strike the resemblance, the two actors don’t quite find the chemistry.

That being said, Looper has plenty of other compelling aspects including some entertaining action sequences which are spiced up by the brain-teasing time travel set pieces. Where most time-travel films falter is in the tricky science of the concept, but Rian Johnson tackles the subject to some satisfaction. In that sense, at least, Looper is certainly like the criminal organisations it features: it leaves no loopholes.

Published in The Express Tribune, Sunday Magazine, October 28^th, 2012.

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