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Set in Kansas, 2044, Joe works for the mafia as a Looper. When the mob wants someone eliminated, they send them back through time 30 years, where a trained assassin is waiting in order to fulfil the execution. Joe, works as a Looper and one day when he sees himself appear he hesitated, allowing the older version of himself to escape. After hearing about a man known as the Rainmaker, Young Joe camps out at one of the homes of the rainmaker’s potential whereabouts, in order to wait for his older self, where he plans on completing the job once and for all.
Looper is set up to be a futuristic mafia film with time travel elements. The idea of time travel was presented in a very engaging and fresh manner, but overall it became a very minute detail. It became a struggle of interpersonal conflicts. Should you waste time caring about something you are uncertain of? Looper allowed us to question the philosophies behind time travel, but never really uses time travel as significant plot device, which takes away from the original concept of time looping assassination. When Young Joe and Old Joe go back and forth at each other within the futuristic Kansas it becomes nothing more than a semi-futuristic chase movie, which is not the film it seemed to be. Using the time loops to chase would have been much more convenient, creating with it a set of alternate timelines that could have played out for different endings.
Once it became a chase movie, it slowed down, becoming more of a character piece than a time travel film. When it slowed down, Joseph Gordon-Levitt was pitted against Bruce Willis and Levitt did a much better job at playing Bruce Willis than Bruce Willis did. JGL looked, sounded and had traits that were resembled Willis too a tee, but Willis was left fumbling to feel relevant. He did little to develop the character of Joe, because JGL had done it all already.
Emily Blunt and JGL prove to have great chemistry through-out the film, and when their characters share tender moments, Looper is at its best. In most of the other scenes, Looper is too focused on creating a cool looking set-piece, or attempting to be witty, when it should be focused on getting its own continuity correct. A few major details where skewed about half way through, and my understanding was Looper was focused on the characters rather than the action, so there is no excuses for Writer/Director Rian Johnson to have skewed his own facts.
When dealing with a film that requires complex timelines in a manner that Looper did, allowing those dates to become skewed has an affect on how the overall intelligence level of the film is perceived. It seems trivial to hold it over the head of the film maker and I understand that, but when your main theme is time travel, does that not somehow make dates the most important aspect of the film.
Crumbling under the pressure of whether or not to be a sleek time travel piece, or a traditional yet well written character piece, Looper settles half hazardously in the middle, which never allows for it to be completely original on any level. We get glimpses of what it could have been, even a montage of time loop assassinations, and then another montage of a time gap of thirty years, and then another quick flash back to the same scene with different results. The time gap montage was shot rather well, but held no real precedence in affecting the overall the plotline of the film.
Billed as a top notch thriller, Looper really failed to thrill me. I felt connected to the characters on some level, but never towards the perilous situation in which they found themselves. That is not to say, seeing Looper is a bad plan, because ultimately it is entertaining for lack of a better term, but may not be the film you thought it would be when watching the commercials. There is one major reason for seeing this film, and that is too see JGL’s range, and his insatiable ability to always have to be the top performer in each of his films. Not to say he purposefully steals the show, but he has this ability to save a film from hitting the ranks of terrible just be craftily creating subtle nuances and character traits.
7/10
