Do the time warp again

Looper
DIRECTED BY: Rian Johnson
STARRING: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis, Emily Blunt, Jeff Daniels
CERT: 15A
In the 2070s, when time travel is invented, the government will immediately make it illegal. As typically happens when the state decides something is prohibited, the mob will move in and corner the market. History, as ever, laughing it up on the roundabout.

 

So the criminal gangs are running the time travel show. This act of market cornering turns out to be a happy coincidence because they seem to have simultaneously run out of options in the body disposal department. A strange development, given their historic efficiency in this field, their legendary knack for making both friend and foe vanish without trace.

So rather than a building’s foundations, ’gator-riddled everglade or bath of acid, when the need arises to make someone disappear, they simply put them in a time machine and whisk them off to the past ­ to the year 2044 – where an assassin awaits their arrival.

These assassins are called loopers. Their job is to blast the masked victim the instant he appears, get rid of the body as they see fit and pick up their wages – paid in bars of silver. It’s a nasty job but the boys live well, in a time when most of the population is scavenging for post-apocalyptic survival, rusting away like their solar-powered micro cars.

The only snag is that, eventually, every looper will shoot his older self, sent back from the future for termination. This is called closing the loop, at which point the assassin retires with a big payday and 30 years to enjoy it. At the end of his retirement, he’ll be stuffed in a time machine and whisked back to the past to meet his own bullet.

Speaking of which, the looper’s weapon of choice is the blunderbuss, a powerful shotgun that does the job just fine, but is only accurate for a few yards. Seems there’s a serious lack of decent firearms available in this wild near-future society. Which makes the shoot-outs more intriguing, one of them in particular playing like an old fashioned duel, if you can imagine an Edwardian gentleman riding a flying motorbike.

Our man Joe likes to keep his feet on the ground, though a fine set of wheels will do for the weekends. Joe (Gordon-Levitt) is one of the best loopers in the business, ­ cool, efficient and planning ahead for the life he wants after the golden handshake. Which might be coming sooner than he expected, because, according to fellow looper Seth (Paul Dano), who’s just botched his final job, ­ things have taken a bad turn in the future. Someone called ‘The Rainmaker’ is calling the shots and closing all the looper contracts.

Sure enough, the next time Joe goes to his usual killing field, Future Joe (Willis) turns up. A tad stunned, the young man hesitates just long enough for his older self to punch him in the face and make a run for it.
Now, you won’t find a sentence like that in a book by HG Wells, or any of the other pioneers of time travel fiction because it kind of violates the rules of the genre, those sacred paradoxes of old. In Looper, however, writer/director Rian Johnson writes a whole new rulebook of his own and he doesn’t seem too bothered about explaining how they work.

For one thing, it would take too long, as Future Joe explains to his young self over steak and chips in a diner. In this world, such a scene is possible without fear of instantaneous annihilation.

Anyway, Future Joe is here on a mission to find the child who grows up to be the Rainmaker. Young Joe is just trying to stay alive in the present and his older, stubborn self is not making it easy. Joe’s boss (Daniels) is hunting both of them down and getting a bit upset with his inept henchmen.

To complicate matters, feisty Kansas farm girl Sara (Blunt) enters the scene with her young son Cid (Pearce Gagnon), a strangely wise little boy whose name is on a certain hit list.

Which puts Looper squarely in Terminator territory, if that story had been told from the cyborg’s perspective. Here, Johnson goes down the philosophical road, throwing out old hypothetical thoughts. Like, if you could go back in time to when he was an infant, would you be able to shoot little Adolf Hitler? And on the question of nature versus nurture, ­ would a fella like Josef Stalin be one of history’s leading mass murderers if his mammy had hugged him more? Johnson’s answer to that makes for a very disappointing ending.
What he does beforehand is excellent stuff, ­ at least for the first hour anyway. The writing is sharp and often humorous, the action is fast and brutal and the production design is brilliant ­ everything about this tattered time and place feels very real. The characters are strong, too and likeable even though none of them are particularly good people.

This is probably Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s finest role yet, not least because he manages to pull it off with his face prosthetically rearranged to look more like Bruce Willis. It’s not a terrible make-up job and he adds nicely to the effect with some recognisable Willis tics and mannerisms.

They only work, however, until the man himself turns up and you realise how silly it all looks. For his part, Willis does his usual tough nut thing and that’s grand. Emily Blunt is fine as the mother and Jeff Daniels is solid as an intriguing but ultimately discarded character. Young Pearce Gagnon almost steals the show as the kid, a part that throws elements of Carrie into Johnson’s mix, potentially powerful future mutations only mentioned in passing elsewhere.

He doesn’t manage to make the whole mix work though and it gets very messy in the later stages. It will wreck your head, too, if you try to make sense of some of it, or maybe I’m just thick as a ditch. In any case, it’s well worth a look because, even when it all falls apart, it’s still an intelligent and stylish spectacle. And you can’t say that too often.