Is Looper a blooper?
Looper. Photo: Entertainment One
Rian Johnson‘s dystopian vision in Looper is a bleak one. Society is split down the middle; those that have money and those that don’t. We are introduced to Joe, played by an almost unrecognisable Joseph Gordon-Levitt, whose face has been cleverly reconstructed with make-up and special effects to look eerily like his co-star Bruce Willis.
The year is 2044, where fuel has run out and cars are plastered with solar panels, motorbikes hover and time travel has been invented.
Joe is a ‘Looper’, a hit-man hired by the mafia to assassinate whomever they send back to him 30 years in the future. While he lives a luxuriant lifestyle; taking illegal ‘eye-drop’ drugs and visiting call-girls, something is looming over Joe’s head.
His line of work has a time limit and he knows that one day, the gangsters he works for will ‘close his loop’, when they send back his future self for him to murder.
When future Joe finally makes an appearance, something goes wrong, and he is not assassinated as planned.
This is the part in the film where things get complicated.
The time-travel story line is full of paradoxes and plot holes that the writers seem to have overlooked. During Joe’s first encounter with his future self, several flashbacks and alterations to the resulting events leave the audience asking questions that are never quite answered.
The production team spent a lot of time and effort altering Gordon-Levitt’s appearance but the actor himself failed to give a convincing performance as a young Bruce Willis.
The film does however, have its own unique take on a subject that has been overused in recent years, and it’s clear Johnson was cautious not to be too over-the-top with his vision of the future.
Visually, the film was impressive. And it did not fail to hold the attention of the viewer, with shoot outs, car chases and some on-screen chemistry between the two male leads. But there was a distinct disappointment with its substance. A sequel (or prequel depending on how you look at it) seems necessary to tie up Looper’s many loose ends.