Looper (2012)

Film: Looper (2012)
Stars: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis, Emily Blunt, Paul Dano, Noah Segan, Piper Perabo, Jeff Daniels
Director: Rian Johnson
Oscar History: None
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

One of my favorite realizations over the past decade in cinema has been the recent and obvious rise of Joseph Gordon-Levitt from quirky kid on an okay television series to genuine movie star.  Gordon-Levitt has an affability you don't see on screen as much these days-a sense of whimsy, of intelligence, of nerdiness that I find quite endearing.  It was on display most and best in the charming and lovely (500) Days of Summer, a romantic dramedy that I totally fell in love with a few years back.  And yet, since then, about the only thing that I feel he's truly added to a film is the smoldering sexual tension he brings to Inception when he spends half of the movie drooling over Tom Hardy.  He's a great presence off-screen and definitely has talent, but his work in Lincoln and The Dark Knight Rises just doesn't seem to fit into the universe that it's trying to inhabit, and sadly, I don't think that he could possibly have saved Looper, even if he wanted to have made the attempt.

(This review is about to get all kinds of spoiler-y) The movie is about, well, it's about every hackneyed Sci-Fi cliche you could possibly imagine, but it's mostly about time travel.  The film takes place in 2044, and talks about how in the future (2074) there is time travel, but it's only used by crime bosses to kill enemies and to ensure that no one discovers in the future that people have been killed, they send them back in time to be killed by "loopers," scummy paid assassins, of which Joe (Gordon-Levitt) is one.  They're called loopers because eventually they have a golden pay day and will have to kill themselves.  You know, of course, where this is going even if you haven't seen the movie or the previews or Gordon-Levitt's stunningly realistic makeup.  Bruce Willis comes back as Old Joe, and because he's a major film star and not some random character actor, he manages to escape from Young Joe and go on the lam.

Here's where I have my first major problem with the movie.  See, I get that Gordon-Levitt is young and short-sighted and doesn't realize that 58 or 62 (whatever age Willis is supposed to be, but it's surely in that range) is right around the corner, but I just don't think anyone is so stupid that they'd want to kill their future selves.  It seems bizarre to me that you wouldn't count your blessings, quickly go on the run, and take comfort in knowing that you lived for at least another 30 years.

And yet, Young Joe chases down Old Joe, and manages to find him in a cafe, and we learn that Old Joe, after years (and years) of debauchery and killing for hire, eventually meets a lovely woman who changes his life, and is killed on the day he is brought back to be looped.  His mission this time around is to destroy the person who put the hit on him (he has the date of birth and hospital code of the 5-year-old in 2044 that he must kill) and hopefully stop his lady love from being murdered.

The film chases on, with Young Joe acting brazenly and quite idiotically.  He's seen what happens to other people who don't close their loop, and yet he still seems to trust that his life will someday return to normal, and again, keeps trying to kill himself.  Old Joe, too, proves that age does not grant wisdom, and decides to murder an innocent child just to save his wife. At this point in the movie, without showing some perspective or more insight into Old Joe, the entire Old Joe plotline is lost to me, and he became a bit of a villain, which may have been Johnson's intention.  The guy is fine with killing two random kids just to try to save himself from a life he chose as a grown man?  This seems most unpleasant and the sort of thing that should be addressed by a film that is too busy trying to please fanboys with random gadgets and "awesome" concepts than to address the psychological torment that is right there for the creative writing plucking.

The Young Joe story also seems to be deeply silly and overblown.  Emily Blunt's character, completely tough-as-nails in her first scene, about faces and gets all doe-eyed and gooey the second Young Joe talks back to her, and proceeds to be more of a random sidekick than an actual strong, independent woman, (which I was so in the mood for after seeing that Piper Perabo's character was simply a prostitute), but in the mind of Rian Johnson, women's roles in the future will either be hooker, waitress, or a mother waiting to be saved.  Not a great moment for feminism.

The film's ending, though, is where a lot of the vitriol is going for me.  Time travel is fuzzy, and in the movies there are dozens of situations that it just doesn't work in (even the greatest of them all, Lost, had trouble with it), and in the (double spoiler warning) ending, where Young Joe kills himself to prevent Old Joe from killing Emily Blunt's son (who is the future guy who puts a hit out on Old Joe), so Emily Blunt's son won't have a reason to enter into a life of crime?  If that didn't happen, then Old Joe would never have sought him out in the past!  It's the paradox of time travel and change the past sorts of situations-once you remove that need, you're no longer coming back to the past for a reason.  It makes literally no sense, and is a big slap-in-the-face to those of us that stuck around through the nonsense to make it to the final scene.