Looper

“I’m not going to talk to you about time travel,” says Bruce Willis to his younger self played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt during one of Looper’s many thought-provoking scenes. “If I did, we’d be sitting here all day making diagrams out of straws”. It’s a throwaway line that suggests director Rian Johnson is all too aware that, while Doc Brown had the luxury of explaining time paradoxes via a chalk board in Back to the Future Part II, Looper should not over lecture its audience and instead stick to its own, impressively crafted guns.

And guess what? It’s all the better because of it. What we have here is a surprisingly accessible SF flick that trusts the viewer is familiar with the general conventions of time travel (i.e. harming yourself in the present will inevitably harm your future self but not vice versa), but also offers a fresh spin on this often rehashed but rarely revisited genre (the most intriguing notion being some future events might just be set in stone but there are plenty of possible routes to get there). It’s the kind of film that puts Men in Black III’s half-arsed take on time travel to shame.

The set-up for Looper is a corker, for starters (pardon the rhymes). The year is 2044 and Joe (Gordon-Levitt) is a low-life hit man with the most unusual of tasks: he executes victims that are zapped back in time by the mob thirty years in the future. Despite the convoluted nature of the assignment, it’s a fairly straightforward job – show up at a specific time and place, dispose of body after execution, collect fee. Except when Joe is unexpectedly confronted with his future self (Willis), things get a little a tricky…

It’s hard going into further detail without spoiling the plot, so it’s probably best to focus on the rest of Looper’s merits. First and foremost, props should go to Johnson for showing the Hollywood big wigs that all you need to put together an impressive SF movie is $30 million, a farm, maybe a few location shots (in this case, Shanghai) and a cast low in profile but high on talent. This may be yet another future dominated by towering skylines, flying vehicles and transparent touch screen phones but the high-tech spectacle undeniably takes a back seat to the characters and especially JGL, whose uncanny resemblance to Bruce Willis is more down to the mannerisms and that cocky John McClane half grin, rather than the dodgy make-up and prosthetics.

But more importantly, Looper pulls off the incredibly tricky feat of balancing bursts of humour – courtesy of Jeff Daniels’ scene stealing pep talk and a diner squabble between the two Joes – with some seriously dark and unsettling touches. One early scene showcases how torture and time travel go horribly hand in hand, while the nature of old Joe’s plans in the present are too spoilerific to be discussed here but will no doubt spark that age-old debate that is so often held in philosophy lectures (you know, the one about baby Hitler).

The fact that the film takes the time to ponder upon such hefty themes does mean there is a significant lack of action during Looper’s third act, but rest assured, it’s well worth the break. Just sit back, take it all in and debate afterwards. Oh, and learn Mandarin.

5/5