Looper Has What Films Should Have

My biggest problem with Looper was trying to find an appropriate way to express how much I loved and enjoyed Rian Johnson's third picture.

Looper gives us the set-up immediately via Joseph Gordon-Levitt's opening narration. Thirty years from now, the three biggest differences in the world are that (a) many people have telekinetic powers, but only to a weak degree. (b) Motorcycles can hover a bit above the ground (woo-hoo!). Oh, yeah, and (c) the mafia of the 2070's got its hands on time travel technology, which they use to send people to the past - to kill those people secretly.

This brings us back to J G-L in the present day as he explains the film's title. "Loopers" are the killers in the past who are employed by the future mob. A hooded-and-bound victim arrives at a specific place and time, the Looper shoots that person, then incinerates the body. The targets also come with the killers' payment, and when the Looper receives gold instead of silver, they know that they have just "closed the loop" - by killing their future selves. It's cold, right?

As you might imagine, Gordon-Levitt's character, Joe, is not a very good person. He lives up to the flaws one would expect of a person who signs up for such work: he thinks he's "going steady" with a hooker who's just on the clock, and he takes a lot of drugs. Yet he's better than his peers - he's studying French and saving a (literal?) ton of his earnings for an eventual retirement in Paris.

Then one day on the job, Joe kills himself, and we see his future flash before our eyes.

Here's that moment - please don't watch unless you've seen the movie!

This brings us to old Joe, who is played by Bruce Willis. The ensuing 30 years have changed him into a loving and devoted husband, a more thoughtful and experienced adult than the selfish ass of his younger days. But when the mafia come to take him back in time, they also ice his wife - and the result is that his past gets altered by his future.

Confused yet? It shouldn't really matter because every element of this picture is well-written, well-acted, and well-filmed; hell, the occasions wherein characters discuss the mechanics and results of time travel, someone just says "forget about it, you'll get worked up, then twisted up, and you still won't understand any of it."

And let's be honest: this whole premise is a genre friendly, functionally-stupid use of time travel, anyway. Even if you were stuck in a situation where "it's really hard to get away with murder today" and you have time travel tech to help, there are easier options. You could teleport people to just above (or inside) a volcano. If you can't control the destination but can control the time, you'd send them back 4 or 5 Ice Ages, or to the Jurassic Period. And if you can't control time or destination, you send them back with a time bomb or something like that.

Instead of debating why the mafia chose this method - and was somehow wise enough to not risk stupidly interfering with time by killing their enemies' parents or such - you simply must accept that this is what they chose to do. They didn't gamble on past sports events or warn their past selves about stuff. Past killers + future victims + 1 pit boss from the future (Jeff Daniels, doing fine work here) is the background you simply go with. You might get choked up on the logic of disgruntled aging assassins, but...

Actually, it's quite easy to go with the flow. J G-L's narration feels solid, and the cinematography is both inventive and beautiful. It won't take long for most viewers to get lulled in by these aspects and be in a receptive mood for the uniquely-interesting adventures of a man who truly becomes his own worst enemy.

Quality writer-directors, like Rian Johnson (whom I revere) care about character and story, and the auteur delivers these two things in spades. Added on to this nifty, noir-ish tale is a rare narrative feat - without resorting to clones or evil duplicates, the protagonist and antagonist are the same person, which lends added weight to the narrative and is a challenge for viewers.

The two Joes are, depending on the particular moment, each up to no good, deserving of our sympathy, and/or doing the right thing. Both of them think that they have the right of the situation. And each of these men experience great change and their own arcs which say a lot about them as human beings, much less different iterations of one person.

And, I'll have to foreshadow now what I will certainly have to say when I finally get around to reviewing 12 Monkeys: when Bruce Willis is in a project he's excited about, or he gets a good script and strong direction, he really is an impossibly-compelling actor. If you've already seen the movie, go look at this trailer to get a nice refresher on how Mr. Willis truly can invest himself and you.

No motion picture has ever made me switch sides so often - or have as complex a set of feelings about - its two central, opposing characters. And I want to craft a poem for Rian Johnson over this one writerly-conceit alone.

Yet you don't even have to spend your time on all the tight thematic elements, or ponder deeply the way time travel works. The second and final quarters of Looper's 118 minutes are mostly action. You can just sit back and enjoy, taking the other two segments as a breather from some of the most creative, unnerving, and thrilling conflict that you have ever seen in a film.

Speaking of this pic's "sections," I should address the point at which this movie may lose some viewers. GENERAL STORY SPOILERS from here to the last para: The first half sets us up for a story that is set either in the future world or in the gritty, mob-heavy present day city to which we become accustomed. I would have loved to have passed the last 60 minutes in either setting, but the picture takes a left turn into much quieter territory, and that is another one of the filmmaker's choices that I simply accepted.

Once again, the focus on character and story made it easy for me to embrace this unexpected development. Beautifully-written, and -acted, and -filmed, the transitional portion of Looper found me initially resistant, and then wholly-welcoming. It's here that young Joe encounters Sara (Emily Blunt) while avoiding the mob and his own older self.

For the audience, it's easy to declare a "truce" on both Joes, as they each face a larger, more powerful enemy - the present and future crime organization that they were a part of and are now hunted by. While this threat is great for creating tension and distracting the viewer from a more difficult set of feelings about the leads, it still comes down to Joe vs Joe. Through Sara, the picture injects a fourth element to complicate matters even more. It also provides fuel for the past version of Joe to experience his own character arc.

The one played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt gets to have his ego-centric worldview altered as he warms up to other people and learns to care about them. The one played by Bruce Willis is a hapless victim driven into a single-minded fix-it machine - thrust into a battle so fierce that he's starting to turn wild.

And for those of you who were paying attention or are writers, part of the narrative beauty of it all is that "old" Joe already went through this exact same personal growth. For this fact alone, I want to ask a genie to give Rian Johnson all the Hollywood clout that Joss Whedon, or Steven Spielberg, or Woody Allen currently possess.

Looper takes its characters and its audience through a cinematic crucible. Both on-screen and in the aisles, expectations and standards are challenged, and viewpoints are incredibly-altered by the events that inform them. In this modern-day, real life landscape of remakes, reboots, and franchises, Johnson and co. gave us a complex and rich character story set in a  brand new scifi world. It has fewer narrative issues than Inception, while also delivering a stronger, less plot-hole-ridden story about the human condition.

I actually preferred another trailer, but it might give away too much.