Film review: Looper (15)

RIAN Johnson’s yarn about a time-travelling Murder Inc hits the mark with superb characters and real depth of vision.

After dropping off the radar a little with his misfiring conman caper The Brothers Bloom, writer/director Rian Johnson makes good on the promise of his acclaimed debut Brick with a big, brainy sci-fi blockbuster that mercifully doesn’t require a truckload of caveats to justify its many attributes. Set in a near-future in which time travel has yet to be invented (but where its effects are already being felt), Looper sees Johnson delivering both a large-scale movie of ideas and a character-driven human drama, one that niftily blurs the line between the hero and the villain by making them the same character.

This is Joe, one of an eponymous band of mafia hitmen who earn a good living assassinating lowlifes that have been sent back in time by the gangsters of the future to be terminated without trace in the present. In the year 2042, Joe is a young guy on the make and is played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, whose newly squished prosthetic nose, digitally altered brow, blue contact lenses and preoccupation with his hairline is a portent of things to come: namely that he is going to grow up to be Bruce ­Willis. Willis plays “future” Joe, a washed-up “Looper” whose not entirely unexpected arrival in the crosshairs of young Joe’s gun causes the normally meticulous assassin to pause long enough for old Joe to escape being terminated by his younger self.

Confused? If you pay attention to the film you won’t be.

The reason this scenario comes into play is cleverly set up by Johnson with just enough puzzle-revealing narrative momentum to hook us into the story without overwhelming us with expositional details. Like all good time-travel movies, this one also has a brain-frying time paradox at its core, the ins-and-outs of which are cheekily dismissed by Willis’s Joe during a marvelous diner scene in which he has a tête à tête with his bemused younger self. What’s important to note is that in the world Johnson has created, this all feels plausible, something that allows the film to spin off in a more interesting direction as Joe’s determination to appease his boss – a wry and ruthless Jeff Daniels – by eliminating future Joe causes our allegiances to switch between the two men as their specific plights take on different meanings.

In the first half, the film plays out like a meaty and satisfying thriller built around the intriguing notion of a guy literally trying to save himself by killing himself. But Johnson broadens this out in sophisticated ways with the introduction of Emily Blunt as a shotgun brandishing single mother whose young son brings both Joes to her rural doorstep.

To say any more risks ruining the film, but suffice to say Johnson has bigger thematic fish to fry about the nature of family and the value of love, something that gives the film the kind of satisfying ­emotional arc that elevates all the dazzling trickery into a story that’s compelling on multiple levels.

It helps that Johnson has designed his world with enough self-awareness to know what he can and can’t get away with. His production designers, for instance, haven’t simply cloned Blade Runner’s cityscapes; instead the film attempts to project what things might look like 30 and 60 years into the future from now: hence the rows of tents lining recession-hit streets and, further down the timeline, the dazzling architecture of a cash-rich China.

Johnson’s action sequences are surprisingly hard- hitting too; the violence is graphic but the fights, chases and shoot-outs have the no-nonsense quality of old-school film noir. He’s also thought through how best to capitalise on the myriad plot conundrums time travel always serves up. There’s a great, gruesome scene early on in which an ageing looper on the run in the movie’s present day suddenly finds parts of his body dropping off. The film briefly cuts to a room in which his younger self is being tortured; it’s all we need to get the point and it serves as a sign that Johnson is going to use such tricks sparingly for maximum storytelling impact.

Which isn’t to say it’s all doom and gloom. There are welcome flashes of time-travel humour that offset some of the story’s inherent somberness. This is not another po-faced blockbuster; it actually wants us to have fun and Willis and Gordon-Levitt are key to that. With the former back on the kind of form he displayed in 12 Monkeys (another great time-travel movie that’s clearly an influence) and the latter (in his third collaboration with Johnson) dropping in just enough of Willis’s mannerisms to convince us both characters are the same person, they’re great movie antagonists to watch.

But Looper is really Rian Johnson’s show and, like Christopher Nolan before him, he’s moving into the big league with incredible brio, confidence and skill.

LOOPER (15)

Directed by: RIAN JOHNSON

Starring: JOSEPH GORDON-LEVITT, BRUCE WILLIS

Rating: * * * * *