There’s this hit-man, played by Joseph Gordon Levitt, who’s supposed to kill his future self, played by Bruce Willis. He doesn’t. Now it’s a battle between protecting the hit-man’s future and surviving his present.
Looper at first feels like a serious sci-fi film. It seems to follow all these complex rules about time travel and throws mind benders fast and furious at the audience, reminiscent of Christopher Nolan’s Inception. Huge fire fights break out, paradoxes threaten to tear the fabric of space-time, freaky time travel related injuries occur. Then, after a slow, character driven middle act, the true film emerges, a morality tale that hardly cares about it’s sci-fi elements, and disregards many of the rules it spent the first act setting up. What seemed like a great time travel movie becomes a stupid time travel movie with a lovely story.
Director Rian Johnson, who made another fine film called Brick, also starring Levitt, which you must see, cares little here for science fiction that make sense. Instead, he’s made a film about selfishness versus selflessness, and what selfless sacrifice really looks like. Both Willis and Levitt think they’re selflessly sacrificing themselves for others, but only one of them truly is. Looper’s ending revelation is as startling as it is beautiful and, I must admit, it made me tear up just a bit.
It’s great to see a film in the action-blockbuster mold that doesn’t follow the action-blockbuster formula. Looper is more like Signs than Blade Runner, and by all accounts it shouldn’t have done as well as it did at the box office. I guess packaging it in an intriguing time travel plot and featuring two hugely popular actors didn’t hurt. Jeff Daniels also delivers a killer performance as a lazy mob boss for what it’s worth. He’s pretty funny.
Warning: There’s some random nudity in one scene for about a minute. It’s definitely skippable if you Redbox it.