Looper (2012)

There’s no denying that Rian Johnson is a clever filmmaker. The question is just how clever you can be before it becomes too much. Thus far, he has mostly stayed on the right side of that line. His first film Brick was an ingenious combination of hard-nosed noir and high school movie, while The Brothers Bloom was an examination of storytelling that was awfully amusing but never quite found a way to take the next step. It’s an example of Johnson perhaps being a little too cute for his own good, and ultimately he wrote himself into a corner. The Brothers Bloom was a film destined for greatness that ultimately tripped on its own intricately tied shoelaces.

The new science fiction yarn Looper is Johnson’s latest crack at flexing his creative muscles, and this is easily his most assured film to date. It is no less clever or ambitious than Brick or Bloom—if anything it has loftier, almost Philip K. Dick-ian goals—but somehow he is able to pack it all in to a single, absurdly entertaining action movie package. It’s also a meticulous film, with a universe that seems thoroughly thought-out and a story in which every last action has a consequence. Looper is not just Johnson’s first science fiction lark. It’s a thrilling, violent, and strangely moving story about much more than time travel.

At the outset, Looper feels like a stylish but not especially unique sci-fi film. Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a Looper; a special type of assassin that kills targets that are sent back from 30 years in the future. Essentially, time travel is controlled entirely by the mob, and Loopers are recruited to serve their duty until their contracts expire. How do they know when their contracts expire? They are forced to kill their older selves. Things go awry when Joe faces off against his own future self (Bruce Willis), who has decided to make quite the mess of his trip back in time. (I shan’t reveal specifics.) Now Lil Joe is forced to find Big Joe and finish the deed before his bosses—specifically a wonderfully nasty Jeff Daniels—get to him first. When a Looper loses their older selves, the mob has some very gruesome methods of luring them back.

Really, this only covers about the first half of Looper. After an hour or so of exhilarating chasing and fighting, Johnson takes an inspired left turn that strips away almost all of the overtly science fiction elements and takes the film’s themes to the next level. Again, I shan’t reveal specifics, but it involves a farmer named Sara (Emily Blunt) who has something very important in her possession.

I was in on a conference call with Johnson earlier this week (it resulted in this story for The Lantern), and he talked quite a bit about how moving from his 20s to his 30s helped him to flesh out the initial idea. Among other things, this transition from youth to adulthood is exactly what Looper is about. When Willis’ elder Joe returns to 2044, he finds himself facing off against his own youth and the seemingly wasted life he has put together. This is as close to a literal generational war as you’ll ever see on film, and Johnson comments quite a bit on the inevitably of generational resentment. The old will always hate the young and the young will always hate the old. This is a cycle that has always existed and will continue to exist until the end of time.

This is just one of the cycles (or loops, if you will) that Johnson examines in his film, and the question ultimately comes up as to whether the future can be legitimately changed or prevented. What’s cool is that it addresses this issue in a way that few audience members will expect when the film begins, and that ultimately Joe’s fate becomes secondary to the fate of others. For a while, Looper isn’t all that optimistic about the malleability of the future. The characters in this film are almost universally selfish, violent creatures who will do whatever it takes to salvage their livelihoods in the present moment, and it doesn’t even matter if the person they have to kill is themselves. You’d be hard pressed to find a moment here in which someone does something purely for the welfare of others. Well, except for one.

Looper isn’t necessarily all that complex of a movie, despite what some may tell you. By that I mean that its goals aren’t at all hidden like, say, The Master. Though it earns its R rating, it is still an action movie, and it has more than enough surface-level thrills to pull most audiences in. The truly fascinating part of Looper is the manner in which it goes about its relatively straightforward business, and the surgical precision with which Johnson was able to put this story together. This is Johnson’s third film, and it may very well be the one that people look back on and say this is when he became the Rian Johnson. Brick and The Brothers Bloom were both incredibly entertaining movies, but they both feel like conglomerations of other films that Johnson had seen and loved. There’s nothing wrong with that—in fact, a lot of movies are great because they borrow from other movies—but Looper feels like an announcement that Johnson has completely found his own, unique groove. He was an audacious filmmaker out of the gate, but this is the work of an auteur taking his game to the next level. Looper is both a terrific movie and one that promises that there’s still plenty of truly transcendent work to come.

Grade: A-