LOOPER

It’s 2044. Joe (Joseph Gorden-Levitt) is standing in a cornfield, looking at a pocket watch with nonsensical symbols. At the appointed time a second man appears out of thin air with a bag over his head. Joe shoots the man dead and burns his body. Joe does this sort of thing all the time. He is a looper, a specialized assassin who kills people sent back from 30 years in the future, where time travel exists and is controlled by the mob.

His life is glamorous. The money is good, there are fast cars, women and drugs. This is fortunate for Joe as it seems that 2044 has suffered an economic apocalypse. One day, Joe gets a looping assignment but the man who appears is himself from 30 years in the future (Bruce Willis). This happens sometimes, it’s known as “closing the loop.”  Upon being confronted with his future self, he hesitates just long enough to let old Joe get away and the chase is on. In another movie, Joe would wrestle with the idea of having to kill his future self, but Joe knows what happens to people who fail to close their loops. 

To reveal anything more would be unfair. Also it would take too much time. There is a lot going on in this movie. Writer-director Rian Johnson (Brick, Brothers Bloom) has created one of the most intricate sci-fi universes to come along in a long time. There's something interesting going on around every corner. It’s also admirable that he has the confidence to not explain too much. Much like Star Wars or Blade Runner, a lot of the details and ideas are left for the audience to pick up on and fill in for themselves. Personally, I was fascinated by this idea of this future society using the past as something to exploit, as a dumping ground for its problems. It was as if 2044 was the subjugated colony of 2074. The future mobsters (I love saying that), even send a viceroy named Abe (Jeff Daniels in a hilarious performance) back in time to run the looper operation and keep them in line.

Another admirable thing about this film is its willingness to let its protagonist be an asshole. Both versions of Joe do reprehensible things to survive in this film, which is fine when it's justified, but though old Joe is given a pretty reasonable out, he would rather continue on a very violent path for the most selfish of reasons. It’s fun watching a film where your allegiance to the protagonist and antagonist switches back and forth, and even more fun knowing that they’re really the same person.

Both stars do wonderful jobs in their respective roles. Between this and Moonrise Kingdom, Willis seems to be on a bit of a roll. Levitt wears some light prosthetics to make him look more like a young Bruce Willis. From the side the resemblance is uncanny, but from the front it seems like he used too much filler on his eyebrows. Who knows, maybe that’s just how the kids wear their eyebrows in 2044. Anyway Levitt is excellent, he’s picked up a lot of Willis’s mannerisms, the sarcastic apathy, the lack of eye contact with authority figures, Levitt’s got the Bruce Willis thing down.

Ever since Rian Johnson broke out with his 2005 noir masterpiece Brick, he's been positioning himself as one of our most important young writer-directors. That he chose to do a sci-fi action thriller is commendable. His intricate world building and stylization suits the genre quite well, I hope he does more stuff like this. Lord knows the genre needs more auteurs as talented like Johnson.

Grade:A-