Movie Review: Looper (2012) · 8:09pm Jul 28th, 2020
I'd heard good things about Looper from a few different people, all of whom were pretty tough critics on movies. Directed by and written by Rian Johnson, this 2012 science-fiction/action story starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis and Emily Blunt was praised for being very smartly constructed and tightly put together. I'd never heard of it (or its director either) prior to Rian Johnson's infamously controversial, fanbase-shattering The Last Jedi, but after having seen and loved the man's delightful murder mystery sendup Knives Out from 2019, I was willing to give this film a go.
So when my father told me that he'd rented it, I sat down to watch it with him, and see if Johnson could make lightning strike twice.
Looper takes place in Kansas in the 2044, and is about Joe (Gordon-Levitt), a young man who works as a professional contract killer called a "looper." For you see, in the future, time travel is invented - but is immediately criminalized; and due to advances in forensics and tracking systems, disposing of a body is next to impossible. So when the criminals of the future need someone gotten rid of, they use time travel. "Loopers" - who are managed by a man from the future, sent on a one-way trip back in time - are given a time and a place, where they go and execute victims who are sent to them via time machine (they also dispose of the body too). Loopers are paid in silver bars that are strapped to the victim's bound body; Joe has been stashing his for a lengthy amount of time and built up quite the collection.
"Loopers" are so named because their final target is, ultimately, their own future selves. To prevent incriminating connections in the future, the syndicate sends the looper's retired future self (marked with gold bars strapped to their body as a retirement package for the present-day looper) back in time to be offed. The present-day looper then is to take the gold, and bugger off and do what he wants with the money for the next thirty years, until the syndicate comes for him to "close the loop".
We follow Joe through a typical day of work. Executing marks behind a cornfield outside the city, picking up payment, going to a diner where he has a cup of coffee, and then at night going out to the mob-owned nightclub with some of his fellow loopers. While Joe is smarter than some of his fellow crooks - especially compared to Seth (Paul Dano) who splurges on a flying motorcycle that he can't actually work, or Kid Blue (Noah Segan), a "Gat Man" who constantly tries to show off with his big revolver (*snickers*) - he's still got problems in his life... namely that he's hooked on some far-future eye drop drug. All the same, he still seems head and shoulder above most of the other crooks, and the looper syndicate's boss Abe (played by Jeff Daniels) approves of him for it...
But then, of course, trouble starts piling up.
It first begins when Seth panics and is unable to close his own loop. He lets his future self go, after hearing "Old Seth" warn him about a menace in the future known only as "The Rainmaker," who will overthrow all the major syndicate bosses and close all the loops. Joe, reluctantly, at first hides Seth in his apartment's floor safe, but ultimately when brought before Abe, he gives up Seth's location. This leads to one of the movie's most chillingly effective sequences, wherein Abe's men torture Seth - while the effects of which pop up on Old Seth's body.
Joe goes back to work as usual the next day, but when his target appears, the man is unbound and is able to swiftly subdue Joe and escape in his truck. This man is Joe's future self (played by Bruce Willis) and he is a man on a mission. In this man, "Old Joe's" timeline, he successfully retires and moves to China, where he becomes a hitman to continue financing his drug habit; ultimately he is able to kick the habit and fall in love with a woman, but when his old bosses come to "close the loop," Old Joe's wife is killed. Before his execution, Old Joe overpowers his captors, and sends himself back in time, ambushes his past self and changes the past.
Old Joe intends to change the future, his future, for good. He has numbers written down, the only information that could be found about The Rainmaker's true identity. He's got them down on a map, with leads on three addresses that he intends to check up on: his plan to secure his future being to kill The Rainmaker before they ever grow up to close the loops and thus get Joe's wife killed.
Old and Young Joe end up meeting at the diner. They both argue over their respective plans and wants, but are interrupted when Abe's men - led by Kid Blue - attack the diner, and a shootout begins. Both Joes escape the scene, though Young Joe gets a piece of the map with one of the numbers on it.
Young Joe follows his map piece to a farm, belonging to Sara (played by Emily Blunt) and her young charge Cid (Pierce Gagnon). Joe collapses from drug withdrawal, and so is begrudgingly cared for by Sara, who figures out that he's a looper and that there's trouble after him. As he recuperates, Young Joe begins to figure out important information about the farm's occupants, in particular Cid...
You see, among the other advances in this movie's future, telekinesis is one of them. A mutation that pops up in about ten percent of the population, it's very weak and can only be used for levitating quarters at most... but Sara's got the gift, and is stronger than most. And Cid, who is her son (though he doesn't know it - Sara initially gave him to her sister to raise), has even stronger powers. So much so, that when he gets angry or scared enough, he can really cause some serious damage.
When a Gat Man (one of Abe's special hitmen) visits the farm in search of Joe and ends up threatening Sara, causing Cid to fall down the stairs and lash out with his powers, the criminal is reduced to a chunky splatter by the telekinetic blast... and Joe knows just *who* this kid will grow up to be, and also now that Old Joe will know this too and be paying a visit to the farm as well...
Through all of this, Abe and his syndicate have been trying to track down and kill Old Joe, but the old looper's formidable experience as a killer lets him tear through them like the Terminator. Old Joe wipes out the syndicate (missing only Kid Blue, who survives by dumb accident) and loads up a truck with loot, driving off to the farm. He and his younger self have a standoff on the road to the farm; Young Joe, trying to buy Sara and Cid time to escape, calls his older self out, but Kid Blue shows up on the flying motorcycle from earlier to try and gun them down. Young Joe is able to dispose of him but the distraction allows Old Joe to go after Sara and Cid.
In the climax of the movie, Cid's powers lash out again, but this time Sara is able to talk him down, reaching out to him as his mother. Old Joe, however, is still determined to kill the boy, and Young Joe - seeing the lengths to which Sara and Old Joe will go for their loved ones; realizing that his future self's actions will lead to Cid becoming the terrifying Rainmaker of the future - chooses to "break the loop" by shooting himself and thus erasing Old Joe from existence. Old Joe vanishes, and our movie concludes with Sara bandaging her son and tucking him into bed, bad future hopefully averted...
That was the story of Looper.
And, as movies go, while I don't hate it by any means, I must also regretfully admit that even though it held my attention throughout (my father nearly fell asleep) I must say too that I don't think it's *as* good as the praise has touted it to be.
There's a lot of good stuff going on in this movie, though, don't get me wrong. I thought that the future setting was pretty well-rendered, just on a visual level, being able to marry together the familiar sights of a rundown Midwestern city with brief but effective uses of certain visual effects - chiefly things like the flying motorcycle, or some other high-tech devices (a cropdusting drone on Sara's farm, for one ready example I can think of).
There are some solid performances in this movie. Bruce Willis in particular delivers as Old Joe, being a character who is both menacing, tragic, sympathetic, pitiful and monstrous in equal measure. Through the flashbacks into his past, you get an intriguing picture of the woman he fell in love with, the happiness he found with her... and then at the same time, in the present of the movie, you very clearly see the dark side of that love, as he's committed to something as monstrous as killing a child to try and preserve what he has in the future. There are two particular standout moments with Willis' performance in this movie that I'd like to highlight: one is when he strains to recall the first time he saw his wife's face (as his memories of the future are beginning to cloud and fog, due to the new experiences his younger self is having), and the other is when he kills one of the targets on his list. The second one is especially powerfully done, without a word spoken or sound uttered. Willis' face tells you everything.
Emily Blunt is also quite engaging as a performer. She's someone strong and driven as a caregiver, especially in regard to her initial interactions with Young Joe, but at the same time there's plenty of other emotions at work in her character: chiefly in her interactions with Cid.
And speaking of Cid, I must admit, the young actor does a solid job!
I also must give credit to Jeff Daniels as Abe. In particular for a little humor during one scene where he discusses matters with Young Joe about Seth and all. You get the sense that he's a mobster who knows when brutality works and when simply talking to someone will work instead. (It's a distinction that comes out well in regard to his dealings with Young Joe, and then with Kid Blue. Ouch!)
However, all that being said... I do have some serious criticisms to levy at this movie too.
First off... I just didn't connect with Joseph Gordon-Levitt. As of this writing, having watched the movie two days ago, I can scarcely name a moment of his performance that captivated or intrigued me the way that Bruce Willis or Emily Blunt did. Some parts of his voiceover have a good dry humor to them (admittedly I chuckled at his exposition about telekinesis) and he plays off Seth well, but that character vanishes from the movie quite rapidly. This is a problem I've had with Levitt before, I had completely forgotten that he had ever been in The Dark Knight Rises, until I looked the movie up later on. His performance is perfectly serviceable, but it rarely feels memorable, at least to me.
Oh, and speaking of memorable... there's a scene in this movie where Sara and Young Joe end up having sex, and I just found that to be utterly cringeworthy and unbelievable. I realized what was going to happen when she discretely signals him up to her bedroom, hoped to God that I was wrong, and nearly groaned when she started to passionately kiss him. Call me what will you, but I just rolled my eyes at that whole moment, I felt it added nothing of substance to the movie, and we could just have skipped to the aftermath (a conversation where Joe learns that she has TK) without missing anything.
My true major criticism of this movie, though? I think it just needed to commit to one plot concept and stick with it - yes the movie establishes telekinesis early on, but puts so much more focus on time travel for the majority of its runtime that I kind of found the revelation about Sara and Cid to be kind of undercooked. The bulk of this movie so clearly owes itself to The Terminator ("super-dangerous assassin from the future out to kill a kid before he grows up" and all) that the "with psychic powers!" angle felt a bit tacked on at points. You're already doing a story about time-travel and the mob, that's a great concept, why do you *need* to throw in telekinesis too? Or alternately, Cid and Sara could make for an intriguing story all on their own. A single mother in Kansas trying to raise an outrageously powerful son in the hopes that he'll grow up to become a good person and help the world? That would be a fascinating story and potential twist on the Superman archetype (and, cheap shot, beat out Brightburn to the punch by what, seven years too?).
(Though, I'd also like to add, admittedly, that the "Cid grows up to be terrifying" kind of loses its umph in some moments. Even when you're doing something like making all the furniture in the house soar into the air... it's damn hard to make a cute kid pouting angrily look *really* terrifying. The first time Cid throws a tantrum, I couldn't help but snicker a teeny bit at him shouting "Liar liar liar!" so many times.)
In the end, while Looper is a movie that I do think has some really strong performances and concepts in it, there was some "spark" missing that kept me from seeing it as the masterpiece that its champions paint it as being. Speaking objectively, I'd probably give it a six or even a seven out of ten, because it genuinely *is* well-shot and has some good performances. Subjectively, I'd probably say five out of ten though. I have no real interest in going back to this one for a subsequent viewing.
Sorry, Mr. Johnson, but I will more than likely be sticking to Knives Out and any potential other Benoit Blanc mysteries of yours in the near future.
Solid review. ^_^
Admittedly I don't know if I'll see it or not, but it sounds like it had potential but didn't hit all the marks.
Also, can honestly say, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is much more entertaining in the 3rd Rock From The Sun sitcom from the mid 90s, seriously that show was friggin' hilarious. XD
5324455
I'm glad you think so.
Thanks!
Yeah... I definitely think it has stuff going for it, but I just don't know, the pieces didn't entirely click well enough for me. (Still enjoyed it more than my father though, that's for sure. XD)
I should try to look for that show sometime then. Because I would like to see JGL in a part that lets him be fun or entertaining. I just found him to be really boring and un-fun in The Dark Knight Rises, and I had little to say about him here either.
5324465
Oh he is absolutely amazing in that show. And for a show about aliens coming down to pose as humans... this show made it way more funny than it had any right to be, and it is AMAZING. Also the show's got John Lithgow, who is also friggin' hilarious.
This show is so damn quotable.
"Oh my god... I'M GORGEOUS!"