Sometimes when you go into the theater you have a pretty good idea what you are going to see. The commercials for Looper seem to give the plot away or so I thought. About half way through the movie everything changed and it kept me guessing. The change wasn’t a big Shyamalanian change like that other Willis flick from 1999. It was if the storyteller put you in a car on a highway, pointed you in a specific direction and once you settled into the groove you took a right turn and went off-road for the rest of the ride.And it was a ride I wanted to be on. I will want to see it again when it comes out on Netflix. The movie serious without taking itself too seriously. The characters admit time travel is confusing. Jeff Daniels’ character makes a reference to other time travel movies like Back to the Future II that had to draw a picture on a chalk board to explain quantum mechanics to the audience. The movie sets up its own time travel rules and follows them pretty well.
Bruce Willis put in his usual excellent performance somewhere between “Red (2010)” and “12 Monkeys”. Since Joseph Gordon-Levitt was playing a younger version of the same character it was an excellent character study of an actor pretending to be another actor pretending to be a specific character. Gordon-Levitt embodied Willis’ mannerisms and facial ticks without impersonating David Addison Jr. (Moonlighting).
The story primarily takes place in the year 2039. There is some social commentary and visual effects but it all is self consistent. We see smaller phones, iPod headphones without wires, solar electric retrofitted cars. We see hovering motorcycles but not flying cars. Our heroine drives an “old” pickup truck with some sort of connection between its tailpipe and gas tank. We don’t get to see much of the future (2069). All of these elements formed a consistent look for the movie that was not hard to imagine.
Fans of “12 Monkeys” will certainly enjoy this movie as will anyone who enjoys a good action flick.
