LOOPER [2012]

THE LOOP IS NOT ROUND


2012, USA
Rian Johnson
7 // 10




Can Bruce Willis pull off another time travel flick? Are future blunderbusses as badass as they sound? Is it OK for British actors to do American accents as a form of retaliation? There's only one way to find out!

It was so easy to get all excited a while back when Looper was announced. Above anything else it meant that at least for a short while, Bruce Willis would NOT be making (mocking?) another Die Hard atrocity. You hear me, Hollywood? Can you all, Misters Directors, keep giving him some decent roles instead of ruining our blood-splattered 80s' childhood memories?

Rant aside, the Looper.

Not what I expected. At all. Even if I'm not exactly sure what was that I WAS expecting. I knew there'd be no going anywhere near 12 Monkeys, because that would be just silly. Not that there aren't any parallels, if you try hard, but that's a different story altogether. What I did expect though, was more action, more Sci-fi, more badassery and more eyes on Bruce. What I got was not that, but what I got was better. Thankfully. Which may be a tad surprising, when you think of all the holes in the story, of which there are many. And yet, I'm not going to talk about any of that. There are thousands of Internet smart-ass nit-pickers who, I'm sure, have already populated the YouTube with their oh-so-hilarious commentaries on 'everything wrong with Looper in X mins or less'. Oh yeah. Internet is full of smart people. Who still, somehow, manage to miss the point altogether. Let's let the man speak for himself for a moment:

With this film especially, because even though it’s a time-travel movie, the pleasure of it doesn’t come from the mass of time travel. It’s not a film like Primer (a 2004 cult movie that deals in the complexities of time travel), for instance, where the big part of the enjoyment is kind of working out all the intricacies of it. For Looper, I very much wanted it to be a more character-based movie that is more about how these characters dealt with the situation time travel has brought about. So the biggest challenge was figuring out how to not spend the whole movie explaining the rules and figure out how to put it out there in a way that made sense on some intuitive level for the audience; then get past it and deal with the real meat of the story.*

So there you have it, first hand, from the director. And I can only say: Hail to that. Looper is not about the time travel. Get over it. What is it about then? When you put it in a sentence, you'd end up with a bunch of clichés (true, the film doesn't really push any boundaries of originality), but its appeal, to me at least, lies heavily in 'how', not in betting everything on 'what'. First, I find dystopian visions of future far more interesting, than the shiny, optimistic ones. We've got more of a chance to end up with Children of Men, than Star Trek, for example. Second, the emphasis is on the characters. They wouldn't make Bergman gasp, that's true, but they're human and fleshy enough to care about them far more, than many a run-of-the-mill thriller can achieve. I'm yet to see Gordon-Levitt in a performance that would make me appreciate his kunst more than his appearance in Inception, but, as far as 'one face actors' go, there are more serious offenders out the... Niro. I also like the way the film does not concentrate around Bruce 'The Megastar' Willis' giving him a secondary role that manages to be both dynamic and, somewhat, understated. It only adds to the general character and the atmosphere of the film which, to quote a classic, are strong with this one. Same goes for brilliant Jeff Daniels, who, for so many people, still remains the more cretinous face of the Dumb and Dumber and nothing more. As for Emily Blunt, the jury is still out as I'm unable to properly judge her redneck twang, but I have a feeling, she's making a much better job of it than Angelina Jolie managed to do with her British accent in the Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow. At least I can vouch for the rest of her performance, even if she's not all that convincing with an axe.

All in all, the Looper turned out to be a lot less blockbustery than I thought, with independent financing translating very well into the lack of CGI extravaganza and putting more emphasis onto the story and the characters rather than overblown, bombastic visuals and a pace that would make a panicking mouse's heartbeat look like a continental drift. Surprising, involving and memorable. There you go, a three ingredient recipe for a good film.

Now, can someone explain to me, what in the name of all that's holly, was that alternate timeline with closing the loop about, huh?

* An Interview with Rian Johnson