DTX120: #49 - Looper

12/2/12

7/27/12

Looper was easily one of my most anticipated movies of 2012. You should know that I love time-travel movies. I eat that shit up. One of my all-time favorites is Frequency with Jim Caviezel. There were parts of Looper that actually reminded me of that, as well as 12 Monkeys and a handful of other dystopian sci-fi films. I also really enjoyed Rian Johnson's Brick - all the more reason to be looking forward to his latest feature.

Perhaps it was inevitable I was going to come away a bit disappointed. I thought the movie was good when it could have been great.

The good: Performances all around, from adult actors anyway (I'll get to that in a moment). Paul Dano is awesome, Willis is Willis, Blunt is a surprising choice to play an American farm woman but hey she's good too, JGL doesn't get to stretch as much as he's more focused on trying to be a young Bruce Willis but even that works pretty well. Whatever strange prosthetic/makeup job they've done to change his face is a little uncanny but I can't see the seams. Personally I think they worked more than necessary on that detail as we would have bought JGL as a young Bruce Willis without changing his face. We already know how that works in movies. Jeff Daniels, Piper Perabo... everyone does a good job.

The plot is explained very simply and quickly in expository voice-over. Lots of details are not explained. The movie gives you the briefest impression of what this future world looks like, what its economic balance is, where technology has gone. This is mostly okay as it's the backdrop to a story that delves more into character and I can't fault it for that. Maybe the fact that Johnson lays out his time-travel plot so smoothly makes us think it's less complicated than it really is. That's probably a virtue as well.

The bad: The primary conflict - or rather, what becomes the primary conflict and the note on which the movie ends. There's just the smallest introduction to "TK'ing," where apparently some people in the future have developed telekinetic power, but they can't use it for anything more difficult than parlor tricks. What this has to do with the time-travel plot is almost nothing. However, it turns into a big deal at the end which imo takes the focus off the much more interesting conflict of Joe (JGL) trying to find and kill has future self. What's worse is that a character introduced halfway through who becomes a focal point is, well, I'll say it, a child. A child who's said to be 10 years old but looks 6, and every single thing that kid says or does is annoying to the nth degree. It's unnatural, irritating, unbelievable. I hated that character and every moment he was on screen. That he figures prominently in the film's climax honestly made the film less like Blade Runner and more like a cross between X-Men and Children of the Corn. I was literally rolling my eyes.

The ugly: Looper contains a scene early on that is possibly the most disturbing thing I have seen in a movie over the past few years. I won't spoil it, but damn.

Overall I liked the movie but it definitely slowed in the second half. I wish it had a more defined visual identity and not so many elements that felt out of place. It's also none too subtle about any of its implications (he moves the silver, blood comes away on his hand, traitor, blood money, Judas reference, etc). I was hoping to Joseph Gordon Love-it, but as it stands it doesn't make my top 10 for the year. Still worth your time.

7/10