Directed by: Rian Johnson
Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis, and Emily Blunt
Plot: A hit man specializing in killing targets sent from the future comes face to face with his older self.
Review:
Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Joe, a hitman in the future. In this future, poverty has hit an all-time low. Homeless and vagrants work their way through the cities as if the world just ended. You keep expecting Mad Max to come bombing around the corner, but instead you get Joe in a very stylish suit and sports car. The criminals of the world seem to have captured the controlling power over most of the metropolises, especially this one according to Joe’s voice over. Joe and his friends travel club to club getting high, hooking up with girls, and doing all sorts of mischief.
30 years further from his future, time travel is invented and outlawed practically at the same time. It is used only by a large criminal organization to send their hit targets back in time to be killed and disposed of at a time when they technically don’t exist. Eventually, all loopers have to kill their future selves. That is called “closing your loop” and ends the respective looper’s contract in his present. You get a nice pay day, and the chance to live out the next 30 years care-free before your inevitable assassination. And Joe’s loop is up.
Bruce Willis plays Joe’s older self. Nowadays, it is very easy to roam into a Bruce Willis movie where he is just phoning it. This is not the case here. This is old-fashioned Bruce like we haven’t seen him for sometime (since The Whole Nine Yards or Bandits maybe). He is a super confident alpha male but not the kind we are used to seeing. He is soft-spoken. He draws your attention instead of demanding it. That is a testament to his confidence that he doesn’t have to overdo it. In addition to this, Levitt mimics him near perfectly. He captures that early Jersey boy attitude. Levitt has a few facial prosthetics to help him out of course. He doesn’t look like the Bruce of Moonlighting or Die Hard, but he does look like someone who could possibly grow up to look like old Bruce. Sometimes the prosthetics looked a little out of place, but most of the time, they actually looked pretty good, surprisingly so.
JGL as a young Bruce Willis
These two guys do not have to hold the movie by themselves either. Writer/director Rian Johnson is easily one of the most promising up and coming filmmakers of our time. His previous works, Brick and Brothers Bloom, are some of the most unique and original works in a market flooded with sequels, remakes, and adaptations. He has an ‘80s sense of action but a ‘70s sense of story and character development. He has steady pacing that helps a story structure that likes to take left turns. He is unbelievably clever at keeping the action going and the stakes up, and most impressive of all, he works time travel in a way that feels fresh. Time travel stories are always a little tough because it tends to paint people into a corner with the inherent logical fallacies within. In a really great scene, an older version of one of the characters is running for his life when things start happening to his body. The bad guys are torturing his younger self doing irreparable damage that catches up with his future version. It is a frightening scene.
JGL and Bruce Willis act their fucking asses off making sure that Rian Johnson’s “out-there” ideas are taken as seriously as possible, even though Johnson’s own cleverness could/would/should carry him all by itself. The movie also features one of the more memorable child actor performances of the last 10 years or so.
Rating: 10/10
