Movie Review – Looper (2012)

Looper was one of my most anticipated films of the year, and in recent weeks hype and marketing have been in overdrive, which sometimes can lead to disappointment when the film fails to live up to those expectations. This, however, is not the case with Looper. I need to see it again, but it quite possibly could be the best film I’ve seen this year, and in a long time for that matter. The last time I walked out of a cinema feeling as challenged mentally by what I had saw was 2 years ago when I had just watched Inception. Looper is an incredibly good film. It’s going to be hard to talk about it without giving anything away, but I shall do my best.

A Looper is a hit man for the mob. Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is one such Looper in the year 2044 (let’s refer to him as ‘Present Joe’). At this moment in time time-travel has not yet been invented, but in the future, it will be and it will immediately be declared illegal and thus only used by criminal organisations who send people they want dead back 30 years to be killed and disposed of by the Loopers. Eventually – and all Loopers know this – their future selves will be sent back in time for them to kill, to “close” their loop, and upon doing so they receive a final golden pay out to go and enjoy the next 30 years of their life. Loopers live the so called “high life”, they are paid well and they live well, and most are addicted to drugs, showing reckless abandon to their fates since they don’t really have much of a future anyway. There is one rule as a Looper – do not let your future self get away. If you do, this is bad for you, and for the whole time-travel/universe thing. And so when Present Joe’s future self, played by Bruce Willis, arrives one day and he hesitates allowing him to escape, things take a turn for the worse for Present Joe.

I know the information is out there, officially, but I had avoided it, so when the plot of the movie unfolded I was really hearing it all for the first time, which is how you should experience it too, so I won’t reveal anything. There is a wonderful scene in which Present Joe and Future Joe meet and talk for the first time in a diner, which immediately stood out to me as very reminiscent of scenes in Heat and The Dark Knight in which the main characters at war meet and have a nice civilized chat. During this conversation Future Joe reveals he had a wife, whom he loved and had saved him from his life of crime and drugs. However when it came time for him to be sent back in time to close his loop they killed his wife in the process. As a result Future Joe wants to kill the Rainmaker, the man responsible, here in his past to stop it from ever happening to Present Joe, which obviously just by his mere presence is beginning to change the course of history. Despite events changing there is a beautiful symmetry in how certain aspects of their lives play out, with Present Joe also trying to forge a better destiny.

Looper really goes in some dark places, and I was shocked by where it went but also feel Rian Johnson (Brick) should be proud of what he created and the story he told. Where the story takes us and the actions Future Joe take are at the forefront of the great time-travel conundrums – the ethical and moral questions we would have to ask ourselves if time-travel were ever to be invented. It’s really well handled, as is the time-travel itself, which always runs the very high risk of becoming paradoxical or just down right messy, but here Johnson has written it very well, which has lead to a number of questions I have. Which is good, because it’s engaging you and making you think, trying to figure things out and to ponder the philosophy and theory.

The world which Johnson has created feels very much like our own, only far bleaker, as rampant poverty runs through the streets of the major cities. In fact, should we look back on Looper in the year 2044 it may be the closest any film has really come to predicting a future time. Technology has advanced, as you would expect, however there are no flying cars or strange unrecognisable societies, just one very much like our own which has decayed and fallen.

There are some brilliant performances from all of the cast; Joseph Gordon-Levitt continues to grow as an actor and gives a second incredible performance this year that will cement him as one of the best of his generation. His character is given a great arc which I really don’t want to say too much about for fear of revealing too much. Bruce Willis, given some pretty dark material in some places, does extremely well and delivers a career highlight performance. It’s funny that he is known as one of the 80s action men, and rightly so, but he is extremely capable of handling dramatic material. Emily Blunt rounds off the main cast with a performance which has depth and diversity.

I fear I have rambled on without really saying much, but I honestly feel a great fear of giving anything about this movie away, it’s an incredible journey to take especially when you have the bare minimum of knowledge of the film going in. Looper is a well written and directed piece of material that has a very personal plot dealing with some very basic human emotions, fate and destiny, the ethics of time-travel and whether unforgivable acts can be deemed necessary, and therefore OK, if they are for the supposedly greater good.