REVIEW OF LOOPER

About The Movie:

In 2044, Kansas looks like Detroit. Tent cities have taken hold under
the highways, men are murdered for stealing a stereo, and one deceptively
casual criminal overlord (Jeff Daniels) controls everything—particularly the
Loopers, punctual assassins who cruise around this urban warzone in shiny
sports cars, wearing their hair slicked-back like '50s French movie stars. Like
all Loopers, Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) has one job: at a specific time
measured down to the second, he'll shoot a hooded man who appears literally out
of the air. Or more literally, out of the year 2074. After all, the best way to
get rid of a man is to time-travel him back three decades and blow off his head
before he pisses you off. Then one day, Joe is ordered to kill the older version
of himself (Bruce Willis)—consider it an assisted suicide. But the now-married,
retired Joe is too smart to die easy, and so the hunt is on with Daniels' goons
chasing Gordon-Levitt, who's chasing Willis, who's chasing his own deadly
agenda. 

What Is Good/Bad About The Movie

First, the facts: Joseph
Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis don't look alike. But through the magic of
make-up and acting, they do. Johnson has shied away from getting specific about
Gordon-Levitt's three-hour prosthetic regimen, though it's clear his nose has
been hooked and his eyefolds creased, plus the young actor has trained himself
to knit his eyebrows together, gravel his voice, and purse his lips like he's
fighting off a smirk. Sometimes he'll tilt his head just slightly and the spell
breaks. But really, who cares. The two are twined together in a dual role that
isn't dependant on cheap mimicry—Willis' version of Joe has, after all, lived
twice the life of his would-be assassin—but instead
thinks audaciously about what it would mean to live in the same moment
as your future self: A fresh slice chopped from Gordon-Levitt's
ear instantly means a cauterized scar on Willis' own. A young man
bent on violence and for-the-moment thrills ("This job doesn't tend to
attract the most forward thinking people," notes Joe) meets the killer his
selfishness created. And an old man who's finally found love would kill the
immature punk who vows he'll walk away from his future bride—except if he kills
him, he'll never meet her at all.

These ideas about mistakes and
mentorship become even more tangible when the two cross paths with a single
mother (Emily Blunt, strong) and her son (Pierce Gagnon, great) and
unthinkingly risk changing more futures then their own. The film flirts with Back
to the Future-style visions of time travel—photos that fade, actions that
ripple forward—but also suggests that, like the gun-toting Loopers, all of whom
have agreed to kill themselves in their employee contracts, there is a circular
order to fate that cannot be changed. And ominiously, Willis reports from the
future that there's a new super boss coming who aims to kill everyone.

What's bold about the movie isn't
just its use of time travel, the mechanics of which Willis refuses to explain,
huffing, "We're gonna be here all day making diagrams with straws."
And its visual effects are brashly low brow—the time machine looks and acts
like a cage covered in a tarp. It's that Looper is so economical and
cold, giving us a ruthless hero set on an even more ruthless quest. There isn't
a single good guy in the film, only varying shades of cruel. And the value of a
life literally has a price: four bars of silver. (Inflation renders cash
useless, a detail left confidently unexplained.) Yet from these
ingredients, Johnson builds toward a shatteringly emotional climax that asks, would
you sacrifice one man for yourself, yourself for the world, or the world for
one man? That question forms a loop. And so does the future.

Overall Grade:

B