Directed by: Rian Johnson
“The unknown future rolls towards us. I look onto it for the first time with hope.” So Sarah Connor comforted us at the end of the game-changing time-travel epic of its day, "Terminator 2." That is, unless our future self is transported back to be killed by our past self, or our future self changes his mind and wants to prevent our past self from disrupting our future destiny, or our past self has something to learn from our future self.
Such are but some of the mental gymnastics Rian Johnson offers in "Looper," his own entry in the venerable genre. It’s 2042, and while time-travel won’t be invented for another thirty years, this is the destination year that the mob sends back victims to be executed, thus doing away with any evidence in their own era. (How the mob went from being tracksuit-wearing "Sopranos" yutzes to time-travel overlords is something the movie never explains.) One of the hitmen, or Loopers, is Joe (Joseph-Gordon Levitt), who narrates his life like a junior version of Ray Liotta in "Goodfellas," and the opening scenes have a quick visual snap as we’re whirled through his routine – execute target; get rewarded in gold bars; eye-drop drugs at nightclub with fellow Loopers; repeat – while the sheer despair of an America reduced to a shabby Chinese colony reminds him of the exclusivity of his position.
The one hitch in the deal is that the Loopers are inevitably faced with executing their own older counterparts – a nice temporal way for the mob to sew up any incriminating associations, but an existential dilemma for the young men, even as their final set of gold bars await on their own dead backs. When fellow Looper Seth (Paul Dano) succumbs to the temptation to “let his loop run” and allow his older self to escape, the repercussions are not pretty; in what resembles a twisted take on Marty McFly’s siblings starting to vanish in a photo as his presence disrupts the past, so the elder Dano’s body parts start to vanish as vengeful mobsters dissect his younger self.
Joe has visions of getting out, learning bits of French to impress a local waitress and looking to start fresh overseas with whatever time his loop allows, but plans are knocked off course when his older self (Bruce Willis) arrives on execution day without the customary emotionally-distancing hood over his head, momentarily jarring young Joe and allowing the man to knock him out and escape.
The elder Joe has arrived with a plan. He’s heard that a mysterious figure called “The Rainmaker” is the one responsible, for some reason, for instituting the Loopers self-executions, and brought a map with the addresses of three children, one of whom may grow up to be this man, and sets out to kill him before he can disrupt Joe’s contented life with a Chinese woman in the 2070’s. It’s nice to see Willis, lately resembling an aging shaved test subject pummeling his way through one iffy graphic novel adaptation after another ("Surrogates," "Red") at least get to show his emoting chops before the inevitable machine-gun orgy, but you never really connect with his desperation to save his relationship with his future love. Their life is presented in a slickly gauzy montage that reminded me of Willis’ ads for Japanese cars (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-Kqt5YIXTs). In fact, the film’s canniest move may be its appeal to the all-important overseas box office through slo-mo shots of Joe’s luxurious later life in China. Bruce is still shilling.
The mechanics of the plot are deft, but its residents look adrift. As young Joe, Levitt’s usual high-spirits feel shackled as he’s in thrall to the nose-piece and makeup that’s supposed to make him look like a young Willis, and there’s not much he can do expressively while locked in his permanent grimace (doesn’t anyone remember that when Willis was around Levitt’s age he actually had more than one expression? Guess not). Soon the match is set: Old Joe wants to preserve the security of his adult life, young Joe wants to maintain his pampered status quo and resents that his future life has been mapped by this annoying old fart, and we’re caught in the compounded narcissistic dilemma of a not- very-interesting character. Their one meaningful encounter in a diner dutifully becomes the inverse of the chorus to Neil Young’s “Old Man” (‘Young Man, take a look at my life’), with Willis predictably berating his younger self for his wayward ways; you half-expect him to start haranguing Levitt for blowing Social Security. (Even I did a better take on this self-meets-self concept during my low-budget sketch comedy days in college.).
When their exchange does threaten to get interesting it short-circuits itself. Old Joe’s “we don’t have time for that shit” retort to Levitt’s questions about time-travel conundrums is funny, but too easy an out. It allows Johnson to lay out familiar time-travel movie tics (the elder Joe’s memory shifting as the younger has encounters different from the original stream, and notes appearing out of nowhere because people from another era are suddenly sending them, a la Dennis Quaid’s "Frequency") without addressing the intriguing issues he himself sets out (like the scene where Levitt is allowed a chance to redeem himself after failing to close the loop. He’s sent another Willis, whom he properly executes. What happened here? Does the later elder Joe who appears and goes on the run mean we’re dealing with multiple selves in one era? The editing is confused. Even "Déjà Vu" with Denzel did a better job of presenting this notion.)
Jeff Daniels, apparently allowed to let himself completely go to hell between seasons of "Newsroom," shows up as Looper overseer Abe, sent from forty years in the future to amusedly keep the whole operation afloat, and thankfully sighs some humor into the mechanics; yet it’s all too brief, and time, whoever is manipulating it, starts to severely drag once Levitt lands on the farm of Sara (Emily Blunt). She’s protecting one of Willis’ targets (scarily precocious Pierce Gagnon, unfortunately given a ‘Damien-from-The Omen-meets-Dark-Phoenix-from-X-Men 3’ backstory), and so we sit out in the country with them for a long, long while, waiting for the showdown at the sci-fi manger. Johnson appears to be one of those young Shyamalan-influenced directors who think dramatic weight is achieved by taking things to a trance-like snail’s pace. Usually a much more spontaneous actor herself, Blunt’s unending look of pained incomprehension inevitably becomes a call to the restroom or theater snack-bar. Finally, the film does a nod to Willis’ other time-travel adventure, "12 Monkeys," as it wraps up in a tidy way so everyone can feel profoundly moved, but more likely to sigh, “That’s it?”
At one point Abe has a comment about Joe’s clothes style – “You’re dressing like movies that are copies of other movies” – which seems to be Johnson’s wink to the audience that he knows much of his imagery is second-hand: the aforementioned "Omen/X-Men" borrowings, the "Blade Runner" cityscape, the floating motorcycles like that of the cop pursuing a young Kirk in Abrams’s "Star Trek," even the diner reminiscent of the one from the Tom Hanks gangster adventure "Road To Perdition." But cloning alone doesn’t achieve greatness. For instance, one suspects Johnson uses a burst of an old soul number while introducing Joe because he saw how smoothly Scorsese used the device as connective tissue in his own mobster films. But in service of protagonists with video-game motives, it just feels artificial.
In the end, "Looper" comes off as a student thesis film with an enormous budget, by a film geek who – as he showed in his Dashiell Hammett-meets high school thriller, Brick, also starring Levitt – knows all the right references and clever twists to make his professor pat him on the back and classmates fawn over him, but who doesn’t yet have the confidence to make something truly alive. Sometimes creating grand concepts is just generic overreaching. Sometimes Marty just trying to get his parents to go to the prom together is the most satisfying time-travel scenario we can achieve.