Review: "Looper"

Review by Robert Lucas

5/5 Stars

Willis does the time warp… again

Here’s what I’ve got to say about Looper. It’s incredible! It deserves all the praise that it’s already gained and more, Looper is, put simply the film of the year; and here’s why.

Before I even sat down to watch Looper I was excited, I only knew the outline; which I picked up from the trailer. Set at some point in thefuture, time travel has been invented but was immediately outlawed by the authorities, only drug barons and gangsters use it now, and they use it for only one reason. To send someone back to the past, to have them assassinated. That’s a film I want to see without adding any other elements to it, but Looper is so much more than it’s premise.

You know what makes a good film great? It’s the tiny things, the little touches, they are what will elevate a film from being cool to amazing, and Looper has details in spades. I could if I chose to use the rest of this review to simply list of all the tiny little details that makes Looper exceptional, but instead I’ll site only one. When Emily Blunt’s character is first introduced she is shown doing a strange mime which looks highly illogical, until later when all becomes clear.

OK I’ll admit it, half way through I did get scared that Looper was going to go all “Twelve Monkeys” on me, not that that’s a bad movie to develop into, especially when you have Bruce Willis in your movie; but I knew that Looper had so much more still to give, to create and to challenge, and challenge it does. I suppose at points you do feel like Looper borrows a little too heavily from other movies, but really I can forgive it for that, like Wild Bill in Silence Of The Lambs, it’s controversial to wear other peoples skins.

This is the question Looper asks us, if you had the chance to kill someone who was evil, a mass murderer, would you? Before they performed all their evil, before they could get started, would you be willing to take another human's life to save thousands of others? What if they were still a child? Then what? Would you be willing to trade your own life so this murderer could live? Knowing they would become the personification of pain?

Now I’m sorry if you are not challenged just by reading that paragraph then you need to know God better. I am a man who believes I would lay down my life for anyone else (after all it is the greatest gift we can give), but watching Looper, even I was challenged in what I would do in the same circumstances. This is a film that should be watched by everyone because it presents us with an idea that frightens us, that being. How good are you? I mean truly in your soul, how good are you?

Looper is so much of a visual frenzy, with distinctive ideas that it demands a second viewing, there is no way you can take everything the movie has to offer in, on the first viewing, it is simply impossible. For a start the plot charges towards you with no rest period from beginning to end and the story goes into some truly dark territories (the murdering of innocent children in cold blood, is a complicated sequence to justify), and the direction is in a league of it’s own.

Looper’s writer and director is a relative unknown in Rian Johnson, I say unknown I’m sure his pervious body of work is strong. However, Looper is made with such precision, such poise, such grace and sophistication; it’s hard to imagine a Nolan or a Speilberg or a Scott didn’t have a hand in the creation somewhere. The style in which the film is made is second to none, every shot is framed perfectly and the camera work is fluid, the special effects are well paced and somehow Johnson has set Looper in the future, but not in one we couldn’t imagine.

One of Looper’s best assets is the two main leads, in Joseph Gordon Levitt and Bruce Willis both playing Joe in different time periods. Both of these men can carry a film all on their own, so when both join together, it is an unstoppable force (in Levitt’s climb to the top) with an immovable object (in Willis' charisma) , needless to say they both bring out the best in each other. A nice element to the movie is that you are always switching sides; there are points where young Joe is the hero, then old Joe, then young again. Ultimately, Looper is a movie without a hero, there is no clear cut good or bad, and it doesn’t pretend to give you all the answers.

I suppose one of the most impressive parts of Looper is that the film is out and out just nasty, there are whole sequences that look like they could have walked out of any graphic horror movie you care to name, but of course they are only used to build the tension and build the films' momentum.

Looper is Back To The Future for adults, it’s a film that doesn’t give you all the answers and asked a lot of questions, it’s a thinking man’s movie, and I love it.

Robert Lucas is from the United Kingdom. He has volunteered to send us movie reviews. You might notice some different wording from time to time! ;-) ~ Clash