Looper unfolds in a future
that hasn’t quite worked out as we’d hoped. Sure, we get hoverbikes, but they’re
slow and difficult to start; those with superpowers haven’t got much past
making coins levitate; the masses huddle in cramped and filthy streets. Time
travel was made possible, only to be seized upon by criminals and immediately
outlawed by the authorities. Now timecops – “loopers”, in this update –
dispense shotgun blasts to those shuttling through the ether, with nothing much
more to expect, at the end of their 30-year career cycle, than to be similarly
blown away by their younger selves, the state’s way of cleaning up this
particular mess.
Our
hero Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, his boyish looks obscured by make-up for
reasons that eventually become clear) is as efficient a looper as there is, but
his sadness sits closer to the surface. He spends his blood money on numbing
drugs – taken optically, as though to wash out everything he’s seen – and
clings romantically to a French dictionary, in the hope of someday getting to
Paris. Then, on the outskirts of a Kansas cornfield, Joe is confronted not with
another disposable ne’er-do-well, but his older self, who refuses to lay down
in the anticipated manner. See, Joe’s more of a fighter than he realises – so
much so that his older self is played by that warhorse Bruce Willis.
Looper proceeds in constantly
surprising directions, introducing its leads in unexpected places, and then
choosing to spend quality time with its characters instead of setting them to
running about. Writer-director Rian Johnson’s debut was the noiry,
too-cool-for-school Brick; here, the
complications lurk in the emotions, not the science. At the film’s heart is a
diner scene in which Willis, still reeling from his wife’s death, refuses to
lay out the technicalities of time travel, and instead tells his younger self
“I can remember what you do after you do it, and it hurts.” The result turns
out to be less like The Matrix than
what James Cameron aimed for on The
Terminator, with elements of Twelve
Monkeys, the recent The Adjustment Bureau and Ashton Kutcher’s weirdly affecting The Butterfly Effect.
Brick was cast for its faces;
Looper goes for gut feelings, a
decision that pays off handsomely. The career progression of Gordon-Levitt –
one of current Hollywood’s few young male leads to be capable of transmitting
sustained sentient thought – remains clear and thrilling: if The Dark Knight Rises suggested his
destiny was to assume the mantle of action hero, here he actually gets to
impersonate one. Yet pitting him against Willis points up how much Young Joe is
still a callow, self-absorbed kid: after being taken in by a stressed single
mother (Emily Blunt, tougher than TheAdjustment Bureau allowed her), with concerns more immediate than working
out her future, he’s even shown sucking on a baby’s bottle.
It’s
rare to see a mainstream American film that dares to point out its target
audience might still have much to learn, but this critical stance goes towards
making Looper an oddly profound, even
moving fantasia about parenting and ageing, and the advantage movies have over
real life: that one’s older and younger selves can be linked with a cut, or a
look, or prosthetic make-up, and set in dialogue with one another. (The fantasy
isn’t limited to self-improving young directors: see also the Alec
Baldwin-Jesse Eisenberg business in Woody Allen’s To Rome with Love.) That Looper
also counts as the year’s smartest popcorn flick, with chases, explosions and
men in supercool coats pointing big guns at Bruce Willis, is almost secondary.
Looper opens in cinemas nationwide today.
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