Overview
It can't be easy coming up with new angles on the time-travelling thing, at least not until time travel actually becomes possible (at which point I plan to go back and pitch Back to the Future to studio execs before Robert Zemeckis is even born). So for that reason alone, Looper deserves fair credit. Not only does writer/director Rian Johnson (Brick) take the genre in a clever new direction, he playfully avoids all the mind-numbing exposition about paradoxes and so forth by saying to the audience: look, since you've already come along to this movie about time travel, let's just agree it works and skip past the whole 'how' part, okay?
Fine by us.
Set several decades into our future, it tells the story of a hit man, or 'looper', named Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), whose hooded and anonymous victims are sent back in time via mobsters living 30 years into his future. For the gangsters, looping provides expedient and untraceable assassination, while for Joe it's a lucrative profession in an otherwise debt-ridden dystopia. It also comes with a unique retirement plan: Loopers unwittingly assassinate their older selves in return for a massive pay day and precisely 30 more years of complete freedom in which to spend it. It's a kind of eerily desirable suicide, and the only hiccup is when a looper's older self (ie Joe Snr, played by Bruce Willis) manages to escape and throw the whole system into chaos.
The film's fascinating premise gives rise to a novel motivation for its protagonist: Joe Jnr must track down and kill his older self so that he can retire and finally enjoy the good life before being sent back to be killed by his younger self 30 years later. They don't call it 'closing the loop' for nothing.
Both lead actors put in excellent performances, though the make-up used to transform Gordon-Levitt into the younger Willis tend to distract more than they impress. There are also some fine supporting performances by Jeff Daniels as the loopers' contractor, and Emily Blunt as a no-nonsense farmer whose interactions with Joe Jnr flesh out the third act with both sentiment and suspense.
Unlike other recent sci-fi offerings such as In Time and Surrogates, there's more to Looper than just a great idea. It's intelligently written, well paced, and achieves a commendable balance between dialogue and action. What's more, in a market increasingly flush with remakes and reboots, the discovery of something genuinely imaginative makes for more than a welcome surprise.