Looper

★★★★

(2012)

Rian Johnson began his career as a young film maker with the Jury Prize at Sundance for his wonderful genre bending Brick. It was a film that struck a weird dark jazzy chord with audiences around the world and arguably launched Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s film career. Although still under-seen and horribly underrated, Brick demanded attention whether the noir dialogue and endless Raymond Chandler references irked you or not. The Brothers Bloom came 4 years later; Miles apart from Brick but, despite bustling with great ideas and an fantastic ensemble cast, it missed the mark slightly, strangely taking on an almost Wes Anderson vibe of whimsy. None the less it had something intangible.

With his third film, Looper, Johnson put’s himself firmly on the map. His ever present joy in time remapping and retro influence is still there but this time the writer/director has made a startlingly orignal film because of it, not in spite of it. It’s an unexpected sci-fi film with far more body than the recent remakes, reboots, prequels and Phillip K. Dick rip offs gracing our cinemas and more than that it puts a wonderful emphasis on our own past and future philosophies as well as being a time travel mind bender.

Loopers are paid hit men, knocking off anonymous hooded men in corn fields and disposing of their bodies almost daily. The difference is that the captured wrong doers are sent 30 years into the past to the loopers who send them off to the big man in the sky, thus erasing any crime or investigation at all for the mob bosses of the future. Sometimes a Looper is sent back to be executed in the very same way (called “Closing a Loop”) and sometimes Loopers find them self face to face with killing their future self.

Our Looper is Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is faced with that very predicament. He is also looking at his own assassination at the hands of crime boss Abe (Jeff Daniels) if he is unable to find his future self (Bruce Willis) who, after arriving unhooded, escaped with his own future fixing plan. Though at first it all might seem a little bit like the plot of a student film, filled with paradox and plot holes (something from which Looper does not escape) Johnson fills it with enough surprises for most of the loose plotting to not matter. He takes time in setting up his wold using the films first 30 minutes to let us be immersed in where it will all go down…

There are obviously twists and turns a plenty here so the less said about Looper the better, unfortunately. What we can say is that a beautifully futuristic first half surprisingly becomes a parable of power, corruption and more importantly, much later on, of nature vs nurture. It’s stylishly shot, Gordon-Levitt, Willis and Emily Blunt as a shot gun weiding farm owner and single mother Sara are all fantastic, the music is eclectically picked and Johnson hardly puts a foot wrong. Though the middle 3rd lags a little while changing gears, Looper is his most assured and enjoyable film yet.

Using montage to show Joe’s thirty year life span after the act as a possible thread of time, he often admirably turns away from violence to show something much more darkly comic or purposeful, his editing is fantastically odd footed and the script for Looper has been tightened into a loop circling other loops. He also pulls a child performance from the young Pierce Gagnon as Sarah Son Cid on par with the magic of Steven Spielberg’s legendary Carey Guffey role in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

It’s true that there are a lot of influences on show here but thankfully they never clutter the film. Looper feels fresh even though it is familiar from title to credits. It has that strange deja vu feeling peppered all through it but for a Sci-Fi mind bender it hits 90% of it’s marks on form and in time.