Looper is on Netflix and you know what that means, I get to rate a 10-year-old movie that I’m seeing for the first time. So if you’re like me, you’ve had dinner and have two hours to kill before Gutfeld! comes on. Let’s dive in.
(RELATED: ‘Red Notice’ Review)
Looper is yet another time-travel sci-fi flick. This one has Joseph Gordon-Levitt, during those 12 months where he was hot, and Bruce Willis sort of reprising his role in 12 Monkeys from the decade before. We are also treated to Dumb and Dumber co-star Jeff Daniels as the evil yet weird Don Corelone.
So what’s it about? I’m not sure. But what follows is my best guess.
The year is The Future and The Future Thirty Years After The Future. This being a time travel film means you have to accept that it doesn’t need to make sense. And fortunately for everyone, including you, that frees you up from a lot of thinking.
This isn’t Back to the Future time travel–go back to try to straighten out the timeline. Here, time travel logical continuity is so convoluted. Allow me to explain.
In the future, we invent time travel. But organized crime, which is the government, has outlawed it, but with one exception: they employ “loopers” to dispose of their bodies. Mafia stoolies and other enemies are sent back in time where a looper will murder them and leave no trail.
Why don’t they use time travel to do like Biff Tannen did and buy a sports almanac, bet on every game and become filthy rich, you ask? Because shut the hell up, comes the answer.
Gordon-Levitt plays the looper. He live in the future Midwest so he gets the Blade Runner future city AND the cornfield where he waits for his hits to drop in from the future future. They literally drop in and he shoots them.
As the story clunkily reveals, he’s also an amoral hedonist who goes clubbing in the future future and hangs with his friends. He’s drug addicted and in a downward spiral. We get to meet his girlfriend–the real life annoying ultra liberal Piper Perabo–and her breasts. We also get to learn that every f***ing future bar is a techno dance club.
There’s two things to know about the future: when future Mafia decides to retire you, they send your future self back to you to assassinate and bury. I think then you get to live the rest of your life until you’re retired. Secondly, there’s a future future future Mafia leader who is retiring all the loopers.
Gordon-Levitt finds that his future self, played by Bruce Willis, drops into the cornfield for assassination (closing the loop). He is killed but spends the remainder of his life making sure that when he’s sent back to be assassinated, he survives.
Confused? Who cares? Let’s press on.
Willis knows that future future future Mafia leader is one of three people. So like the Terminator looking for and killing all the Sarah Connors in the Los Angeles White Pages, Willis is killing all the possible future future future Mafia bosses.
Thus we leave the first act of the degenerate looper and enter the second act–the time travel nemesis a lot like Terminator but instead of a killing machine, our hero has to kill himself. Our young looper simply wants to preserve his life and the status quo so he must kill his old self who shouldn’t even been alive.
Willis becomes essentially the same character he played in 12 Monkeys, a tragic hero who must reluctantly perform his duty. It’s grim, but our hero gets to meet our heroine played by Emily Blunt. She’s the tough-as-nails female protagonist who starts as a reluctant helper and evolves to the key to saving the future. Also, she’s hot.
We’ve once again reached the point where everything following is spoilers. So suffice to say: future future future Mafia leader, his destiny and self-sacrifice come into play in the third act.
This is written by Rian Johnson, who before writing and directing the turd known as The Last Jedi, produced interesting content. He wrote the most interesting Breaking Bad episode, “The Fly“.
Cranky’s Middle Aged Movie Review rating: The Wife Is Out Tonight, This Isn’t a Complete Waste of Time.