Looper

Looper – Looper, a science fiction thriller directed by Rian Johnson, is like the slogan of a Republican campaign commercial come to life: our present misdeeds have so utterly befouled the future that those who are forced to live with the consequences of our irresponsibility arm themselves and return to the past, which is our present, to inflict an awful punishment on the miscreants. The debt got out of hand, the seas were irreparably polluted, and resources squandered – so the men of the future have a “bone to pick with us.” Of course, I am supplying a subtext and social commentary notably absent from Looper which is, essentially, a loud, bone-jarring, and fantastically violent chase story. The film’s premise is this: for reasons inadequately explained (I think in only one parenthetical comment), young men in the year 2044 have been recruited to assassinate gangsters sent back in time through some inscrutable method of time travel. The gangsters contract with a sinister visitor from the future Murder, Incorporated to serve a thirty year term as executioners. At the conclusion of the term, the assassin is sent back in time to be executed by himself as he was thirty years earlier – this is called “closing the loop.” The film’s ceaseless mayhem is triggered by Bruce Willis, as an old, seasoned murderer, encountering his youthful doppelgaenger played by Joseph Levitt Gordon, the pistolero deputized to execute him. People as wise as Roger Ebert have claimed that the plot of this film makes sense – it does not. The movie’s ending has a certain logical appeal and makes an interesting moral point (one that Sophocles propounded 2500 years ago – “best not to be born”), but it is really the only aspect of this film that is coherent. The film’s first twenty minutes are gloriously strange, witty, and compelling – we are in media res and the film takes off like a race-horse. But, then, the picture stumbles badly in its second half: there is a subplot involving the young killer’s betrayal of a friend that is completely baffling and that terminates in some gruesomely repellent images (the guy seems to melt away) that are wholly baffling. I kept waiting for this sequence to be explained, albeit in vain. Then, we see two alternative versions of the execution (or failed execution) of the Bruce Willis character – why? The two scenes are shot from a single angle with a curlicue of weird cloud in the sky – the cloud advances a little signifying that one of the alternate scenes takes place slightly later in the film’s chronology. But what does this mean? Why doesn’t Bruce Willis remember the dramatic events that occur in the movie? Are there actually two alternative and equally probable realities proceeding simultaneously ala Schroedinger’s cat (in one box Bruce Willis is dead; in the other he is alive – and both states are true)? The movie is very handsome and has some interesting special effects. The dystopian vision of the future is grungy and intriguing. The future turns out to be a dirtier, more squalid version of the present with worse cars and more poverty. The movie is a mash-up of The Terminator and The Fury – it has a very effective telekinesis plot that is superimposed on the gangster versus gangster chase scenes. Elements of Bladerunner are evident in the voice-over and the set decoration. Kansas City where the action apparently takes place is filmed from the sugar cane fields (why cane?) like the Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz and the last forty-five minutes seems a combination of Witness (the wounded bad guy hiding out with a beautiful Amish widow – here a reformed junkie—and her cherubic son) on an idyllic farm – and various Westerns. The picture is very involving, has grim epigrammatic dialogue that is quite effective and is pretty entertaining – the climax is good. But too much is crammed into the picture and there is too much violence and not enough interaction between Willis and Gordon, who are both appealing characters (or an appealing character in the singular). It would have been a much better movie if half of the shoot-outs had been eliminated and the two main characters allowed more time to act with one another.