Mini Review - Looper

This was initially intended to be a guilty pleasure review but upon closer examination I’ve realised something, there’s just not enough material for me to do so. GP reviews tend to fall into 1 of 2 categories, one is the movies which I enjoy in spite of their flaws out of legitimate passion for what they’re adapting. The Dark Knight Rises and Daredevil (and arguably Iron Man 3) are prominent examples.

The vast majority however are movies with lots of sci-fi silliness, not intended to be taken very seriously. This allows me to have fun pointing out some of the sillier parts of the plot whilst at least enjoying it because its tone works. The other thing about guilty pleasure movies, there tend to be problems scattered throughout the movie, I would argue this isn’t really the case with Looper.

Looper’s certainly seen some good reviews, holding a damn good 93% on Rotten Tomatoes and 84% on metacritic. In the box office it held its own, making $180m (give or take) on a $30m budget, hardly blockbuster territory but it’s not what this story was aiming for.

The plot? In the future, time-travel was invented and immediately outlawed. Criminal gangs use it as a means of killing people off. Because tagging in the future means you can’t kill anyone without it being traced back to you immediately, they instead send their victims back in time and have agents called Loopers kill them. Now why they couldn’t just inject their victims with a slow acting poison before sending them back is another question but really I suppose it’s just they don’t want them running rampant. Maybe cripple him and then send him back with the slow acting poison.

Anyway, when they want to release a Looper from his contract, and presumably dispose of evidence of their operation existin, they send back the Looper’s future selves to be killed by their past selves. Again, cripple + slow acting poison, just saying. This is called ‘closing the loop’ and failure here in particular would have dire consequences.

Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is one of these Loopers, he’s so greedy he’ll sell out his, ahm, ‘best friend’ in order to keep his money (but doesn’t do the safe thing of changing his safe code afterwards) he’s also a drug addict and all-around douchebag. You standard, *cough* ‘protagonist’ for a movie like this. He is ready to kill his future self but finds that his future self (played by Bruce Willis) had evaded captivity and travelled back in time from his own accord. His mission, to seek out a villain named the Rainmaker before he can become said villain, saving his wife and completely altering history.

Oh yeah, and there’s something about telekinesis, it’s important to the plot but only in deep spoiler territory, it’s literally a nothing for 2/3 of the movie.

So, what do I think about this movie? For the most part I think it’s a good movie, a good movie, not a great movie. Let me make that distinction again, it’s good, not great.

Paradoxes are a way of nature in time travel movies, this one has several of them. The pre-destination paradox is the one explored most here: by attempting to stop an event happening, you inadvertently set off a chain of events that cause the event in question. This is a classic time travel plot, however the logistics of it become problematic in this movie. The old Joe is from a time-line where he killed his future self however, the events he causes to create the Rainmaker (and I won’t spoil exactly what they are) are caused because he doesn’t get killed by his past self. I do hope you’re following this…

An even more common time-travel paradox is the temporal variety, whereby by changing the past you negate the need for you to travel back in time in the first place. This happens in a lot of movies, Back to the Future, Doctor Who, Wolverine and the X-men (we’ll get to it) and a lot of others. Of course, this movie is chocked with them to. Old Joe’s entire mission would’ve been a temporal paradox had he succeeded. and of course we have the ending. Guys, the only way I can cover this ending is to spoil it so apologies in advance here

Seeing that Old Joe is about to create the Rainmaker, Young Joe decides to kill himself, eliminating his older self. Also stopping his older self from travelling back in time, resulting in him becoming an outlaw and forced to flee to the house of the Rainmaker. Argh, my head hurts, I don’t know about you.

One thing this movie did well was with the characters of Joe. Yes, I’m counting Joe as two characters since he simultaneously exists from two different periods in his life. Young Joe is a cocky bastard, selfish to the core and without remorse for any of the faceless victims he kills but ultimately he is not without some moral codes. Whilst he does protect the child that would be the rainmaker out of necessity at first, he eventually comes around and becomes more compassionate, even refusing to kill him even after affirming he really is a powerful bastard

Old Joe meanwhile is the gruff old man who is forced to make the hard choices. He looks down on his past self for some of the choices he made but has little regrets for them. His origin is an interesting mixture of badass and tragic as his choices define him much further into the future. God, watching him gun down the entire Looper base was a crowning achievement of awesome, even if Kid Blue, a character who’s just there and really serves little purpose to the plot, survived his assault, albeit briefly.

However, don’t think he’s the sympathetic character, he’s willing to gun down children and really just about anyone in his way. Some might argue his drive to do what he does makes him much worse than young Joe. For me, I think we have sorta redemption arc. Whilst Young Joe becomes more compassionate and a better person, Old Joe does almost the opposite, he becomes worse, from killing children and willing to kill anyone else in his way. The redemption concluding with Young Joe having to make the ultimate heroic act: sacrificing himself to stop his future self.

This movie has an ultra-serious tone and whilst there are movies I would not be pleased to find this out, I think it’s warranted here. I mean they kinda start with a best friend who’s kinda comic relief but they cut out the comedy by having him debilitated and his future-self murdered. Again, I don’t think even at the core, this is a movie that warrants a lot of comic relief, and it definitely isn’t a PG-13/12 movie.

I am not one to comment on acting, editing or directing unless it’s noticeably atrocious and it’s not in this movie so as far as I’m concerned they’re done well, I’m much more interested and writing and character arcs.

I suppose I’d better mention the mother. She and her son, the would be Rainmaker, are a central point of the second act of the movie. We get an interesting insight into their relationship and why there are strains on it that Young Joe in some ways kinda helps to heal as part of his ‘redemption’ arc. The idea of the kid being raised by his sister because his real mother was too busy partying and sh*t is an interesting one.

We also have to have it so this kid is showing some signs of the Rainmaker, he’s very short-tempered and has power to make his outbursts very scary to the point his real mother has a panic room to avoid his wrath. Them learning to love each other was a lovely sentiment of the movie, meaning that the ending, whilst still dark, carries an element of hope with it.

This movie has a lot of it right, the problem is no-one has ever made a faultless time-travel movie that involves changing a character’s respective past. There’s always gonna be some kind of paradox to it. This movie has a number of paradoxes, some of which might’ve been preventable with a redraft or two. But the movie has it where it matters, character and cohesion (mostly), whilst also making you think enough for you to have reasons to go back and re-watch it.

Rating 80/100

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Images/clips used in this review are from Looper and belong to their respective owners. All images in this review are subject to fair use