By Jay Stone
Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis, Emily Blunt, Jeff Daniels
Rating: 3 out of 5
The biggest problem with time travel is that you get a headache thinking about it. If someone from the future comes back to the present, is he doing everything again, or changing things so that the future to which he will return won?t be there any more?
It?s a metaphysical conundrum for which the time-travel film Looper has no patience, although it seems to have patience for just about everything else. When the issue comes up, a man named Joe (Bruce Willis), who?s coming back in time, tells his younger self (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) that you could talk about it all day and make diagrams with straws. Frankly ? and ironically ? he doesn?t have the time, although you?d think he could manufacture some.
The film is set in 2044, when the younger Joe ? Gordon-Levitt has been smoothed out to look like a passable version of Willis, right down to the smirk that has aged into an action hero scowl ? is a ?looper,? an assassin who is hired by gangsters from the future. ?Time travel has not yet been invented, but 30 years from now it will have been,? young Joe tells us, lapsing into the future perfect and eschewing the mind-bending possibilities of the conditional.
The future bad guys get rid of their 2074 enemies by putting them in a time machine, sending them back to a Kansas farm, and letting Joe blast them away with his ?blunderbuss,? one of several pieces of retro equipment ? like junky cars fitted with solar panels ? that decorate this mythical past of a mythical future, neither of which has happened yet. Hey Joe: got any of those straws handy?
The loopers are paid in bars of silver. They make their real money in bars of gold, handed out when the future bad guys decide to ?close the loop? by sending an older looper back to be killed by his past self.
Then he has 30 years before he dies. ?This job doesn?t tend to attract the most forward-thinking people,? Joe says, a bit of hard-boiled noir that fits into the film?s mash-up of genres: dystopian sci-fi (flying motorcycles that are hard to start; cell phones that are even thinner but have the same reception problems) crossed with gangster amorality (including Jeff Daniels as a villain who?s a little too genial to be threatening) and a bleak social commentary that populates the streets with the desperate homeless and wandering gangs of vagrants.
Why the future bad guys want to kill their loopers has something to do with a new overlord, called The Rainmaker, who is making the coming years a nightmare.
That sets the stage for the return of Joe to be killed by his younger self, and while the future is different, it obviously hasn?t changed that much: the Bruce Willis of 2074 still dies hard, and moreover, he?s here on a mission. The conversation between the older and younger Joes calls to mind those late-night fantasies where you berate yourself about something stupid you did in the past: the man, it turns out, is still father to the child.
The result is a world with the twists of, say, Gordon-Levitt?s Inception, but none of its existential anxieties. The idea of a man chasing his older self in order to murder him evokes delicious possibilities of cosmic vertigo, but writer-director Rian Johnson ? who tackled lighter complexities in the con man comedy The Brothers Bloom ? has created a corkscrew world that straightens into a pedestrian (if fractured) chase film.
One hero is trying to change the future by altering the present; a late-coming heroine, played with disappointing softness by Emily Blunt, is trying to preserve it on a Kansas farm from which Dorothy might have been launched into a more derivative Oz.
The result is a film that is decorated with clattering ingenuity and a dreamy and surreal tone, but told with a blithe disregard for the pretzel logic of time. It?s d?j? vu all over again, right down to a sweet little kid named Cid (Pierce Gagnon), one of those preternaturally talented children who usually pop up in horror movies to be too wise for their years.
Looper plays as if Terminator was staged by M. Night Shyamalan. That?s really something you can get a headache just thinking about.
Source: http://o.canada.com/2012/09/28/review-time-travel-thriller-looper-a-dreamy-ride/
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