94% Looper

It?(TM)s a wonderful thing to see a director come into his own and with Looper, Rian Johnson just that. His first film, the excellent teen noir Brick showed tons of promise from a director who was able to take the language of a Dashiell Hammett novel and combine it with the visual aesthetics of an early David Lynch film. His next film, the convoluted con men picture The Brothers Bloom, borrowed too heavily from the works of Wes and Paul Thomas Anderson and Johnson lost himself in his inspirations. Looper, a time travel film that deals in themes of personal responsibility and cleverly staged gunfights is more than a return to form; it?(TM)s a new plateau in Johnson?(TM)s artistic development.Set in 2044, Looper is set in an America that has fallen apart, where economic collapse has led to wipe spread homelessness and resurgent and dominate organized crime syndicates, Joseph Gordon Levitt stars as a specialized assassin ( Looper) tasked with killing undesirables who?(TM)ve been sent back in time by even more powerful future syndicates. Gordon-Levitt?(TM)s Joe lives a life of easy access and monied excess that at times resembles a particularly well written GQ article. The cost of living in a perpetual Drake video is that your time as a looper ends when you kill your future self and receive a hefty severance. And because this isn?(TM)t a Johnnie To movie, Johnson runs into trouble when his older self (Bruce Willis) gets the jump on him and goes on the run.Just to get it out of the way, no, the time travel stuff doesn?(TM)t make a whole lot of sense. Time travel obeys the rules causality but only in part. A wound inflicted in the present will affect a person?(TM)s future self but only after the damage has been has been done, not retroactively. Therefore when a character is shorn of his extremities one by one it only hits a person?(TM)s older self after it happens. This presupposes that changes to the timeline taking effect actively and then retroactively which doesn?(TM)t really work but as Bruce Willis makes a point of telling his younger self, the mechanics of time travel don?(TM)t really matter to the film?(TM)s larger narrative. The rules of the game as its played are explained with as little context as possible and it?(TM)s easy to keep up once there are explained. This is a good thing. It really doesn?(TM)t matter how the Enterprise travels through space only that it does.Outside of the flimsiness of the film?(TM)s fake science, the film?(TM)s world is very well designed out and presented. As befitting an extremely depressed economy, most everybody drives a barely held together car that?(TM)s a few decades out of date and the new stuff, like hover bikes, looks awesome but works as well as a new Android phone. There?(TM)s also strain of Western iconography (blunderbusses and gun belts abound) and antiquated gangster talk that subtly hints at world where multiple timelines have converged and broken down. Everything looks dirty and lived in a way that grounds the film even in the midst of multiple temporal paradoxes. This seamless world of contradictions proves that Johnson has significantly upped his game.In addition to being a great science fiction movie, Looper is also the best Bruce Willis action movie in quite some time. Instead of the CGI damaged implausibility of Live Free or Die Hard and RED, this movie lets Willis do what Willis does best, kill scores of bad guys with a machine guy and his wits. As proven by one of the films most exciting sequences, it?(TM)s far more satisfying to watch Willis kill a man with his bare hands than to drive a semi into a fighter jet. Willis is also more engaged here than he has been in years, perhaps not coincidentally because he has the rare opportunity to play a villain.Gordon-Levitt is also good but ultimately isn?(TM)t quite a match for an on his game Willis, visually or otherwise. Johnson and company decided that to sell Gordon-Levitt and Willis as the same person, Gordon-Levitt has been outfitted with prosthetics to better resemble Willis. This is a bit of problem, not only because most everybody knows what Willis looked like at Gordon-Levitt?(TM)s age but because Gordon-Levitt is much wirier and graceful man than Willis and no amount of appliance can fix that. Still Gordon-Levitt is good here; quiet and capable in a way that suggests he can make the action hero thing a full-time gig. The rest of the cast is just as good as the lead, Jeff Daniels as a world-weary mob boss especially. He?(TM)s a calmly exasperated presence, even in the face of watching his entire operation be taken apart by a time displaced version of an ex-employee. Emily Blunt as Gordon-Levitt?(TM)s love interest is good as a mother to a time bomb, all subtle longing and parental concern. As is tradition her part is underwritten, but she makes the most of it despite looking way too good to be as impoverished as her character is supposed to be. Noah Segan is good as a henchman which is to say he?(TM)s dumb and brutal convincingly. Paul Dano, Garrett Dillahunt and Piper Perabo all put in compelling supporting performances with Dano?(TM)s tragically stupid looper being the standout.The last decade has seen some excellent debuts from first time directors like Eli Roth and Richard Kelly that showed a lot of initial promise only to fail to deliver on that promise as with all of Roth and Kelly?(TM)s post debut films and after Brothers Bloom I thought Rian Johnson was going to be just his fellows, a one hit wonder unable to move forward as an artist. With Looper Johnson proves he can move past his influences, learn from his mistakes and become the kind of filmmaker he always had the potential to become.

November 3, 2012

Source: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/looper/

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