Aylmer to Zazzoo and Beyond: Looper

Friday, September 28, 2012

Looper - Review

Looper
(2012)
Action/Adventure, SciFi/Fantasy
Runtime:1 hr 59 min

Rated: R Some Sexuality/Nudity, Language, Drug Content and Strong Violence

Grade: B+

Director: Rian Johnson
Writer: Rian Johnson
Stars: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis and Emily Blunt | See full cast and crew

In the futuristic action thriller Looper, time travel will be invented - but it will be illegal and only available on the black market. When the mob wants to get rid of someone, they will send their target 30 years into the past, where a "looper" - a hired gun, like Joe - is waiting to mop up. Joe is getting rich and life is good... until the day the mob decides to "close the loop," sending back Joe's future self for assassination.

Looper is very original, creative, and well crafted storytelling. It has a sort of Twelve Monkeys / Blade Runner / Total Recall feel to it. I thoroughly enjoyed it. In my opinion the best Sci-Fi movie of recent years, and perhaps one of the top 10 of all times. I'd have given it a higher grade if not for the unnecessary nudity and profanity. Although it is still early, according to the movie tracking website 'Rotten Tomatoes', both critics and the public agree on this film by a positive rating of 92% and 91% respectively. (Read more)

Old Joe (Bruce Willis) and wife Summer Qing (Qing Xu)

Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis are excellent. Pierce Gagnon as the little boy Cid is also a standout performance by a child actor. Emily Blunt (like Collin Farrel) does a great job of obliterating any trace of her English accent. The script and direction by Rian Johnson (in his second film) keeps you engaged throughout. It certainly didn't feel like a 2 Hr. movie, I never once checked my watch.

Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), Beatrix (Traci Toms) and Old Joe (Bruce Willis) at the diner.

The trailers tell you enough of the story without giving away anything that will ruin the ending. Joe is a looper, a hired assassin, who a criminal syndicate from the future pays, in bars of silver, to get rid of people they want eliminated so they end them back in time to the 'looper' to kill and dispose of the body erasing any trace of that person in the future. When the syndicate no longer needs the services of a particular looper, they close the loop. This is done by locating the looper in the future and sending him back in time with bars of gold strapped to his body as payment to the looper himself to be killed. The gold bar retirement program is to provide a good lifestyle for the looper for the next 30 years at which time he will quickly begin to disintegrate until he vanishes into oblivion. Joe suddenly finds he has just been 'retired' but Old Joe escapes and now he has a real problem on his hands and must hunt is future self down and eliminate him before his boss (Jeff Daniels) has him killed for his screw-up. Entanglements with an assortment of other characters complicates this task even further.

I don't want to write a spoiler here, so I won't do a synopsis. Suffice it to say that I recommend it, with the considerable caveat of the nudity and language, which is really unfortunate because I think it would be intriguing to teens, but I don't approve of subjecting them to those negative elements. Yes, I know they have heard it all and worse from the mouths of their peers at school, at the the mall, well...practically everywhere but that's no reason to tacitly condoning such conduct by paying to subject them to more of it.