Looper [Movie Review]

Labelled on the posters as this decade’s answer to ‘The Matrix’, ‘Looper’ stars ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ Joseph Gordon-Levitt and action man Bruce Willis as two generations of the same character. Thirty years in the future Joe (Gordon-Levitt) is a looper, a person hired to assassinate people sent back from the future another thirty years ahead when time travel has been invented and bodies hard to dispose of. A looper’s job is to receive the hooded and clocked person, shoot them with their blunderbuss gun, and dispose of the body, getting rewarded for their work with silver bars that can be converted in a bureau-de-change into real cash.

However, eventually in the life of a looper, their future self is sent back to cover up their crimes with a golden payout but the knowledge that in thirty years they will be dead. This happens to Joe as his future self comes back but he fails to kill him and thus begins a cat and mouse game as both are on the run from the organisation.

‘Looper’ is full of fantastic concepts, not least the one outlined above. There is a sub-plot about telekinesis that works well, and the futuristic environment is well created in CGI, from the buildings, to vehicles to the sci-fi conventions of screens and adverts etc. Sure, I don’t think cities will have so much new construction in thirty years but it feels right. The whole world is well created with a gritty, realistic feel and a big sense of them and us, from the high-flying drug-taking life of the wealthy loopers, to the poorer end of the community with patched-up cars, living lives out of trolleys. Gun crime is rife in this world, a world that looks futuristic but without being unrealistically futuristic.

The first half of the film is where it excels. Gordon-Levitt is captivating on screen as Joe, with make-up and prosthetics on to bridge the gap between him and an older Bruce Willis. Some have commented on the distracting nature of these effects but, to be honest, I didn’t notice them, other than they had a neat similarity between them. The time-lapse, though quick, where the two actors change from one to the other is well done. Willis has lots of fun as Joe’s older self and, alongside Jeff Daniels as Abe – my favourite in the film – there is a lot of humour employed amongst the darker side of the story, from a great scene involving a looper and a spinning gun to one where the loopers chase Willis with Gordon-Levitt, only to turn on the latter when they realise what’s happening, to many scenes shared between Gordon-Levitt and Willis that highlight their similar personalities separated by thirty years.

And the humour does compliment the darkness well. We have a looper that fails to kill his victim and is thus is slowly surgically worked on, removing his fingers and legs, nose and more, changes that immediately reflect on his future self, a grotesque but well realised transformation. There are characters working in strip joints; characters addicted to drugs; and characters that are willing to shoot somebody with a click of the fingers.

You may be thinking from reading this so far that I agree with the reviews, that the film is brilliantly. However, though there are some great concepts and the first half of the film is great, establishing the world, characters and concepts with precision, the second half goes awry. There is a scene half-way through where two new characters are introduced, characters that set the direction of the film, that feels in the cinema like they’ve just missed out something, like the jump cut is too major and it is really disorientating and takes about fifteen minutes to get back on track. It is where we are introduced to a character in the future who is destroying the world and how he can be stopped, which is the direction the film takes from now on. Here we find concepts introduced earlier, such as the telekinesis returning, but the way they are used, to me, felt confusing, rushed and appearing out of the blue, and not gelling with the rest of the film. After establishing Willis as a credible older Joe, with emotional reasons why he is how he is, his character flips to a killing machine and one that doesn’t sit right with what we’ve learnt, as well as a character who seems to be able to brush off bullets and avoid gunfire whilst killing everyone else, a cliché that is often employed but sits awkwardly in this film after what it has established and so much realism set up.

The ending also feels rushed. Emily Blunt as Sara encounters a young Joe and is very wary of him but within a couple of days suddenly changes from a hard-faced country-living woman used to living on her own who has seen a lot of things to someone who, in a shoe-horned in section, invites young Joe in for sex rather than, er, doing the job herself as is implied. The ending plot line and twist makes sense but seems forced and comes to quickly and we don’t see enough about how Joe old and Joe young react to it.

‘Looper’ is an interesting film and establishes some fantastic, involving concepts in a future that looks realistic but also well set up with its CGI and landscapes. The first hour is a delight to watch with much humour, darkness and great sci-fi scenes that all blend well, brought to life by the characters. But then, in the second half, it’s as if they got bored and it goes all too rushed, unrealistic and losing the focus, throwing the audience in a bad way out of the universe it created. It felt like two different films accidentally glued together by an uninterested projectionist. The same film that establishes the character name of Beatrix which is used in a neat twist and loads of other great and exciting concepts doesn’t seem the same one that introduces a character straight out of the Exorcist and turning Joe into some sort of impenetrable fighter.

Not a bad film and I’m glad it saw it, but certainly not a strong film as ‘The Matrix’ that it’s being compared to. (5/10)