Film review: Looper

SCIENCE fiction ­poses questions that other genres either can’t answer or haven’t yet considered. Questions like, “can ­robots fall in love?”, “why would an advanced civilisation become so preoccupied with taxation in a galaxy far, far away?”, and “in any world, parallel or otherwise, could Joseph Gordon-Levitt grow up to be Bruce Willis?”

Looper (15)

Director: Rian Johnson

Running time: 118 minutes

Star rating: * * * *

Looper answers that last question in the affirmative, but only after Gordon-Levitt spent three hours in the make-up chair having a beaky false nose glued on and contact lenses applied to turn his brown eyes Brucey Blue. And even then, it’s a toss-up whether the thirty­something actor will grow up to be Mr Die Hard, Joey from Friends or one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

It’s set in 2044, and Gordon-Levitt is a dandyish thrill-seeker called Joe who is working in the Looper business. Every so ­often he heads out to a remote spot and waits for a hooded and hog-tied victim to materialise from thin air. Then he shoots them with a blunderbuss, collects four bars of silver from the corpse and disposes of the body.

The targets are being sent back from further in the ­future, where time travel is possible but quickly made ­illegal. However, in 2074, a crime organisation has concluded that the most effective way to dispose of obstacles is to flash them into the past, where young men make sure they disappear without a trace – and that, when the time comes, they will also shoot their older, now useless selves to pieces, thus neatly closing up their own existence, or loop. “This job doesn’t tend to attract the most forward-thinking people,” admits Joe.

However, when his older self (Bruce Willis) arrives unexpectedly, he causes the younger Joe to hesitate long enough for his fiftysomething self to kick his ass and escape. Joe knows that if he lets an older Joe run around in 2044, it will bring forward his demise at the hands of his boss (Jeff Daniels). However Willis is older, smarter and bent on changing his fate. In particular, he plans to kill the mob’s big boss, who is currently ten years old.

If you think about all this for too long, it brings on the sort of headache you might experience after watching Matrix 2 and 3 as a double bill. Is this really the best use of time travel? What does this mean for predestination? Can Old Joe remember where his young self is when he’s trying to track himself down? Or to put it ­another way: you won’t really care so much about Gordon-Levitt’s plastic nose any more. Willis suggests that the best way to deal with physics and metaphysics is to just go along with it, “or we’re gonna be here all day making diagrams with straws.”

Sound advice – because Looper is a delicious movie with some imaginative curveballs, such as the physical changes caused when you mess with a timeline; hurt a young looper, and immediately his older self develops the scar tissue. And while you may think you know where the film is heading, especially when Emily Blunt appears as a tough single mother with a precocious son, Johnson still manages to add a controversial twist. With a touch of 12 Monkeys, Terminator, Inception and even spaghetti westerns in its DNA, Looper is also a satisfying creation in its own right, with nice sight gags including a moment where young Joe keenly checks his hairline. Too late really: Willis was bald by Moonlighting. «

• On general release from Friday