Looper is a curious movie, personally I hadn’t even heard of
it prior to randomly seeing that it had a 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Generally this means you “have to see” a movie at all costs, but in this case I’m
not so sure. Looper is a solid film to be sure and maybe has a lot of mass
appeal, but it’s still flawed in such a way that it would behoove critics to
analyze it. So why the 94%? I think it has enough random arthouse elements
tossed in that make ancient people happy is the best I can come up with, but I
truly don’t know.
Joseph Gordon Levitt stars as a man in the future… whose job
it is to kill people sent from even further in the future. Once a day he walks
out to a field and shoots an instantly appearing masked man, then collects his payment
from the body and incinerates it. This is a really great premise I have to
admit, but they could have done a lot more with it. Eventually “Loopers,” Joe
Gordon’s job title, shoot their future selves and are released from service;
receiving a much increased salary. Then the movie starts referencing a
theoretical future villain who is “closing all the loops,” and this is your
first logic hole. If the loops are being closed in the first place doesn’t it
mean the system was already set up to do that? It’s Sci Fi, dumb stuff happens
who cares.
Bruce Willis is Joe Gordon’s future self, and shockingly
enough he doesn’t die within seconds of appearing. At this point they try to
track down and kill the future antagonist, whatever shell he might inhabit. You
might think this is just another character like it would be in a suspense film,
but instead it’s a randomly introduced character some time later. Why? I guess
so the film could be more artful? There’s plenty of things they could have done
with already extant characters to make the film interesting, but instead you
kind of continuously have new characters thrown in the mix up until the last 30
minutes. Each character is individually solid but it makes you wonder, what if
they were solidified into just a few extremely interesting characters?
I won’t spoil the necessary elements, but suffice to say the
movie is interesting throughout and certainly had a lot of potential to be
fantastic. However, it isn’t. It’s a surprisingly good movie for when it was
released in the Calendar year, August/September tend to be death knells and
have been box office wise. The only extremely remarkable thing about this film
is the universal praise and the solid chance that it will receive a Best
Picture nomination, another casualty of the 10 selections process (Avengers and
Dark Knight Rises will likely also receive them, if only to recognize how much
they’re carrying the industry financially). Under-deserved praise, mayhap, but
still a worthwhile picture.
