Movie Review | Looper: Loop your comprehension capabilities!

Miller’s Crossing. The Royal Tenenbaums. Magnolia. Three Kings. All films by modern American directors who already showed considerable early promise with their first two movies, only to hit the ball right out the park with number three.

 

Rian Johnson does just that with Looper, an extraordinary time-travel tale that’s as intricately and elegantly constructed as the pocket watch Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s hitman Joe keeps close by. Much like Johnson’s 2005 debut, the Gordon-Levitt-starring high-school noir Brick, Looper comes complete with its own dictionary, starting with the title.

 

A ‘looper’ is a specialised assassin. His job – not a particularly difficult one, is to bump off mob targets that arrive hooded and helpless and then dispose of their corpses. The twist is that those marked for death are being sent back from 30 years in the future – 2074 to be precise – when time travel has finally been invented.

 

Practised so the Mafia can hide their dirty laundry in the past, the only rule is “never let your target escape” – even if that target happens to be your future self. This is called “closing the loop”. When the Mafia think it’s time to retire their assassin, they send his future self back to be shot by his 2044 self. The situation only gets stickier when future Joe (Bruce Willis) arrives in the past with his own agenda - a Shanghai surprise that will throw everyone for a loop. It has something to do with The Rainmaker.

 

 

Undeniably, Looper is conceptually big, bold and brave enough to stand alongside The Terminator, Back To The Future and Willis’ own 12 Monkeys. Yet Johnson pulls together a plot that plays fair with the genre’s internal logic. It’s a world where carving a message in your arm will leave a scar for your future self to read, or where further physical trauma can literally leave you cracking up.

 

Crucially, for all its tick-tock plotting, there’s an emotional story at Looper’s core, bringing gravitas to its grand design. Themes of nature vs. nurture, family, redemption and undying love circle around these morally uncertain characters - issues that come sharply into focus with the arrival of Sara (Emily Blunt), a shotgun-wielding single mother who allows Joe to take refuge on her farm.

 

Prosthetically pleasing

 

One of the movie’s real high points is its vision of tomorrow’s world. Looper’s future is not so different that it seems alien to us; its rendering is as subtle as the prosthetics that pad out Levitt’s face: far-away backdrops, skyline shots, a floating vehicle here and there…

 

Ed Verreaux’s production design is prosthetically pleasing. Just the occasional jarring strangeness - some characters can float coins with a mysterious telekinetic power - puts Johnson’s universe out of line from ours.

 

If there’s a flaw, apart from certain plot-points that resist Johnson’s own logic, it’s that the director lets the pace dip a little too much prior to this, in the farmhouse scenes. Gordon-Levitt, coming off the back of The Dark Knight Rises and 50/50, caps a terrific 12 months with a performance brimful of maturity. The cast includes Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis,Emily Blunt, Paul Dano, Jeff Daniels, Piper Perabo and Noah Segan have performed well and succeeded in convincing the concept to the audiences.

 

Team Adgully gives the TriStar Pictures Looper 3 stars out of 5. Directed by Rian Johnson and is rated R for strong violence, language, and drug content. Be ready to travel back and forth with your mind!  | By Ankita Tanna [ankita(at)adgully.com]