In 2044, time-travel hasn’t been invented yet. By 2074, it’s illegal, not that it matters to certain industrious crime syndicates using it to dispose of bodies. That’s where loopers—the mob’s garbage men—come in. Loopers get paid in silver bars sent on the backs of their bound & shrouded bounties courtesy of their future benefactors. The hits appear from the ether and the loopers blow them away (perfectly demonstrated in the opening shot, pun intended). One day, each looper will tear open their victim’s straight jacket to reveal not silver but gold. The gold arrives on the back of a looper’s future self, 30 years on at the termination of their employment. It’s called “closing your loop”.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a looper by the name of Joe. As it happens, so does Bruce Willis. So, naturally, Looper is the story of what happens when Young Joe gets outfoxed by Old Joe and “lets his loop run”.
Before getting too far into paradoxical shenanigans, Looper writer & director Rian Johnson (Brick, The Brothers Bloom) acclimates the viewer to the dystopian Kansas City of 2044; the sort of lawless setting expected from a Western but draped in civil decay the likes of which cinema has not seen since Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men. Automobiles from the twenty-teens are jury-rigged with solar panels, China’s reach as the new world superpower extends even into graffiti, vagrant hordes roam the streets, and a small percent of the population has developed telekinetic abilities (they’re known as TKs for short) useful only for parlor tricks. Loopers, however nihilistically hollow their existence, are about the only ones who get to enjoy the finer things in life (shoddy hover bikes, hookers, and narcotics taken via eye-droppers) because they’re among the few with hard currency after America’s economic collapse.
All this backdrop plays out primarily in Looper’s first act, deceptively easing the audience into the world with seemingly little to no exposition (another common trait Looper shares with Children of Men). Johnson keeps the focus—always—on Looper’s characters and it shows. Joseph Gordon-Levitt in particular is phenomenal, putting in likely the best performance of his career (it’s easy to see why he called it “my favorite thing I’ve ever done”). Of course, Looper’s big hook is JGL portraying a younger version of Bruce Willis. Part of it comes from makeup—as it must—but obviously Levitt and Willis will never be identical, but the work done on Levitt is so logic-defyingly good you’ll double take like a reflex action every time Young Joe is on screen. But Levitt is what sells the makeup—the mannerisms, the facial expressions, body language, and speech patterns are all perfect. In fact, it takes a good fifteen minutes simply to quit marveling at how uncanny it is.
Which, as luck has it, is when Looper’s first of three story arcs, a parable of sorts, occurs. After living a day in Joe’s shoes, Johnson shows a day gone wrong and the nightmarish consequences exacted on Joe’s unfortunate partner, Seth (Paul Dano), as future Seth looks on in horror at the results of his younger self’s vivisection. So when the second arc—Old Joe overtaking Young Joe—rears its head, Young Joe scrambles to “get right” with his time-traveling mob boss, Abe (Jeff Daniels), while avoiding Kid Blue (Noah Segan) and the Gat-Men.
The second act is the most heavily promoted as it contains the bulk of Young Joe & Old Joe’s cat and mouse game, culminating in Looper’s centerpiece diner exchange. It’s at this pivotal encounter (a powerhouse scene from both Levitt & Willis) where Looper takes a left turn from the noir-inflected pacing and cityscapes of the first two acts and into the the third act’s rural setting and Western pacing (but not before a beautifully composed and wistful montage of Old Joe’s thirty-year retirement in Shanghai). Young Joe, delirious from withdrawals, stumbles upon the lonely farmer, Sara (Emily Blunt), her precocious boy, Cid (Pierce Gagnon), and, unwittingly, Old Joe’s plan.
Looper’s final act is somewhat anomalous. It’s during Old Joe’s 12 Monkeys/MacBeth self-fulfilling meddling that Young Joe bonds with Sara and Cid and in that way it plays into the popular tropes of time travel narratives (similarly with action tropes when you just know Old Joe is going to kill every last one of Abe’s men). But it is Johnson’s divergent direction (for example, Johnson’s camera doesn’t linger on Bruce Willis, God of Death, so much as it riffs on his reputation for being a bad ass) and the final act reveal that Johnson isn’t merely content to dabble in time travel but to explore the larger sci-fi universe (the second movie this year, after Chronicle, to use a judicious invocation of Katsuhiro Otomo’s groundbreaking anime, Akira) that transforms Looper into the stuff of film legend.
It’s chockfull of mind-bending causality knots, the gory aftermath of telekinetic superpowers, clock motifs, deliberate easter eggs to reward multiple viewings, hints at Abe & Kid Blue’s relationship, visual callbacks to 12 Monkeys & Die Hard, and a recurring Lost Boys motif that lets Rian Johnson blast through a Gordian knot of time loops with Young Joe’s blunderbuss. In Looper, Rian Johnson has crafted the most consistent and clever time travel flick since Timecrimes, and very probably his masterpiece. Looper is highly original, immensely entertaining, and full of heart—a film to be marveled at, dissected, argued about, and cherished for years to come.
