On the couch

DVD REVIEW

 

 

Looper *****
Directed by: Rian Johnson
Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis, Emily Blunt, Piper Perabo, Jeff Daniels

Here’s a little life lesson for the future – if you see a film made by Rian Johnson and starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt just watch it. Don’t check the plot or the rest of the cast or anything else. Just watch the damn movie. Because, beyond a shadow of a doubt, it’s going to be good.
Looper is Johnson’s third, following on from the the quirky but slightly over-stretched The Brothers Bloom and his brilliant debut, Brick a sun-drenched film noir set in a Californian highschool.

As different from the other two as they were from each other, Looper is a high concept sci-fi that deals with questions of morality, consequences and the all-important – if you could fight yourself from the future, who’d win?

Set in a world where time travel has been invented and made illegal, sojourns into the past are solely the preserve of organised crime gangs who use it to perform assassinations, the task deemed too dangerous and easy to track.

Rather than doing things the old-fashioned way and dumping the body off the Jersey Turnpike or feeding them to alligators the unwanted individual in 2074 is tied up with a bag on their head, strapped with some bars of silver and sent back to 2044 where a looper is waiting to kill them, dispose of the body and pocket the silver.

Joe (Joseph Gordon Levitt) is one such hired gun, working in Kansas and teaching himself French in between regular gigs shooting people in a corn field. All is going swimmingly until he finds his future self staring back at him from across the field and he chokes, letting Old Joe (Bruce Willis) get away.

In the world of looping this is about as big of a mistake as can be made and suddenly Joe goes from gangster number one to the quarry for every gangster in town.
His plan to make amends with his bosses and “close the loop” as they term it – the process whereby the business arrangement the loopers and their bosses is cleanly concluded and the shooter gets to spend 30 years spending his considerable severance package – is confounded because Old Joe isn’t just looking to avoid getting abruptly shuffled off the mortal coil, he’s back in the past with a plan to do more than just survive.
But to say any more than that would ruin the fun.

One of the best things about Looper is just how cool it is. There are any number of tiny triumphs in it that go unheralded and make it all feel entirely more earthy than it it really is.

To start with the time travel. There’s not too much boffin-talk about how it works, why it became illegal or how the criminals got their hands on the tech. It’s just a part of life, assimilated like the flying motorbikes, existence of humans with telekenetic powers or taking drugs by placing drops onto the eyeball. Nobody else is making a big deal out of it so why should the audience.

Next is the startling performance of Gordon-Levitt as the young Bruce. A prosthetic nose, a little selective shaving around the hairline and a brilliant performance adds up to some serious double-taking in the scenes the two share. If ever they want to reboot Moonlighting, JGL is a dead cert. Also virtually unrecognisable, Emily Blunt also stars as a tough corn farmer.

There’s also the story which, while not Inception-level wacky, still requires a bit of concentration to wrap the noggin around. It’s intriguing, unpredictable and exciting but, because it’s level of complication isn’t trumpeted, you won’t notice quite how hard it has you concentrating until you try to explain the flick to someone else.

As with Brick, Looper exhibits Johnson’s ability to construct a fully-fledged world and then drop the audience right in the thick of it.
As thrilling as it is fascinating Looper is the perfect antidote to the flashy-looking but ultimately dissatisfying Prometheus. It might even rank as the best time travel flick since Twelve Monkeys or Primer.

With three films this good behind him, the future looks bright for Rian Johnson.