"Sup, ladies. My car just took its top down, hint hint."
In the Future, Miatas are Cool
Okay, first things first, Looper is a really hard film to review. It’s nearly impossible to discuss in any meaningful way without spoiling the whole thing. I generally ignore the chicken little, virulently anti-spoiler, review-commenting H8RZ, and some films can’t really be spoiled – The Master, say, which is ninety percent mood and visuals. But with Looper, you spend most of the film collecting little story threads from different times and places in the hopes that at the end, you’ll be able to make yourself a nice soft logic quilt, and that the figure-eight, infinity loop of the plot universe will close unto itself with all cause and effect still intact, so that the little dudes on rollerblades can skate around it super fast. (That’s us, bro, rollerblading around the figure 8 of LIFE). And in Looper, like a Christopher Nolan movie, the what or why of an action happening onscreen is usually justified retroactively, rather than set up in advance. So to question a plot point’s importance or believability necessitates revealing its outcome and thus removing an element of suspense (which, even for a critic, is sort of a dick move). But beyond all talk of what I did or didn’t like or what subplots did or didn’t come together in the end, the biggest takeaway is this: Rian Johnson is trying to blow your mind, and this is important.
What we already know from the trailer: It’s 2044. Time travel hasn’t been invented yet, but in 30 years, it will have been. It’s outlawed, but controlled by criminal organizations (WHEN TIME TRAVEL IS OUTLAWED, ONLY THE OUTLAWS ETC ETC). When they want to kill someone, they send the victim back in time to 2044 to be dispatched by specialized assassins called loopers, whose only skill seems to be the ability to aim giant, one-shot shotguns called blunderbusses at people, and then go home to play with their future motorcycles and classic Mazda Miatas. One such looper, obviously, is Joseph Gordon-Levitt in weird makeup, who one day comes face to face with his future self, who is Bruce Willis (explaining the weird makeup). Except for being able to see his face, this is how the looper arrangement is supposed to work. They sign on for 30-year contracts, in the process killing their older selves and “closing the loop.” Thus, when JGL and future JGL encounter each other, the conflict is whether future JGL (Bruce Willis) can convince present JGL to sacrifice his comfortable present for the possibility of a longer future (“no, dude, seriously, it’s mega-cool here, you’re gonna love it!”). Conversely, JGL has to convince his older self to go quietly to his early grave so that he can keep the dub-step Miata gangbang going without complicating it with a bunch of mob dudes trying to kill him. We’ve all had similar hangover dreams starring the ghost of liver-health future, I’m sure.
While Looper is a lot like a Chris Nolan movie in that you watch things happen, and you have to try to figure out why without your brain melting out your nose into your popcorn until the explanation comes, one welcome difference between Johnson and Nolan is that whereas self-serious Nolan seems like he’d explode into confetti if he ever tried to make a joke, Rian Johnson is actually pretty playful. At one point, when JGL and Bruce Willis are sitting across from each other at a diner (and again, this scene is in the trailer), JGL asks him, “So tell me about the future. Or wait, since you’re me, don’t you already know what I’m about to say (etc. etc),” and Bruce Willis’s response is, “Is that what we came here for, to talk about the implications of time travel!? We’d be here all day, making models with straws!” It’s a welcome bit of fourth-wall breaking, Johnson going tongue-in-cheek with his own plot to let you know that time travel is always going to be slightly beyond your linear-time-based comprehension, so stop expecting Doc Brown to show up with his chalk board. Also, whereas, at least in The Dark Knight movies, Nolan’s style of “relentless subterfuge” (as Armond White called it) is mostly just that – a style – Looper is a time travel movie whose entire theme is alternate, parallel, causal universes, so the hard-to-follow plot is actually a case of form following function (much like your mom’s big fat ass).
The story has a couple holes too spoilery to talk about (I’m including them below, so you can read them when you’re ready), but here’s just one irrelevant one: Why does Joseph Gordon-Levitt have a New Yawkish accent in the present but a Southerny one in the future? I like that the movie doesn’t seem concerned with how good their impressions are of each other, but that still seemed odd. The ending is also a bit of a case of “why the hell didn’t you just do that in the first place?” and the significance of the guns is never really explained (I didn’t need an explanation, but it left me curious). That said, the fairly nihilistic movie actually ends on a pretty humanist note, and even more importantly than that, Rian Johnson just seems like he cares (and this was my first Rian Johnson movie, I entered without bias). The shots are beautiful without being self-conscious, and, countering the shaky-cam trend, he gives sequences of violent action violence while maintaining a sense of composition and spatial awareness, as opposed to just juggling the camera around and editing it all to sh*t like an assh*le. Much is communicated solely through visual.
Rian Johnson wants to blow your mind. And my mind, like my wiener, likes getting blown. Even if they trip up here or there, we need filmmakers who are trying to blow your mind (especially ones that can do it while still having fun) to maintain film as a vital medium, one that can accomplish things that other mediums can’t. Without that, you get theater, an increasingly-irrelevant art form with an increasingly-insular audience, where most of the biggest sellers are just stunt-casted live movies with cheesy musical numbers added. At the risk of sounding like John Gruden when he says “This is a football player!”, Looper is a movie. And we need movies to show people that they need movies. How’s that for closing a loop.
GRADE: A-
-
–
—
SPOILERY DISCUSSION
I get that Bruce Willis somehow knows the addresses of all three babies born the same day as The Rainmaker, but isn’t it kind of a huge coincidence that his favorite hooker’s baby just happens to be born on the same day as the future Rainmaker? And isn’t that wild coincidence the only way that the gangsters catch up to Willis? And without having known that, isn’t staking out some random hooker’s house kind of a bonehead move for the gangsters?
This isn’t really a “hole” per se, but it seems like the sympathy to the little kid who would be Rainmaker on which the entire plot rests is based almost completely on the fact that he’s cute. I mean, he is ridiculously cute, but still, you’re telling me you wouldn’t let a guy who travels back in time kill Hitler because Hitler just happened to be a cute kid? And you’re willing to bet it all that the kid won’t grow up to be Hitler if people just stop messing with him (at a point in his life when he’s already been messed with)? That’s a SERIOUS nurture-over-nature argument.
![[avatar]](http://p.uproxxcdn.com/photo/257/thumb)
![[image]](http://cdn.fd.uproxx.com/wp-content/thumbnails/130/110/2013/06/danza-danzig-150x150.jpg)
![[image]](http://cdn.fd.uproxx.com/wp-content/thumbnails/130/110/2013/06/this-is-the-end-group-150x150.jpg)
![[image]](http://cdn.fd.uproxx.com/wp-content/thumbnails/130/110/2013/06/review-the-bling-ring-filmdrunk-150x150.jpg)
![[image]](http://cdn.fd.uproxx.com/wp-content/thumbnails/130/110/2013/06/WarOfTheArrows-150x150.jpg)
You don’t travel all the way through time to play patty-cake, or whatever, you kill that fuckin’ kid!
“my mind, like my wiener, likes getting blown”
Somebody just found a tombstone inscription………
The last time either of those happened to me, it was the Sixties.
*sobs*
Was she in her sixties at the time?
For anyone who has seen it already, did you think the entire second half for JGL was like a mini Days of Heaven?
If I’m getting future weapons sent back to me, I’m gonna need some type of ray gun: blaster, phaser, plasma rifle in da foordy watt range.
An indie-inflected popcorn movie with major brains, brilliant acting and a highly satisfying payoff, “Looper” is the first must-see movie of the season.
Also, do Emily Blunt and/or Piper Perabo do anything to um… help this film “earn” its R rating?
No. ;-(
My decision to wait for DVD has been confirmed.
Vince must have ran out for some more Mountain Dew during Piper Perabo’s topless scene.
And Emily Blunt seductively touches her thigh in a nightie for like half a second. So there is that too.
Ah, right, that was legit, I’m sorry. I was so focused on wanting to see Emily Blunt’s goodies that I plum forgot.
Can’t tell if serious…….
Well everything in my post actually happened
Don’t wait for DVD on this one. Support movies like this when they’re in the theater so they’ll still allow people to make movies like this.
I want to go to there.
If you go there, you will be run over by a blundering bus.
Driven by yourself.
I’m interested to see if Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s handsomeness can overpower the Lon Chaney-esque make-up they’ve got him in & secure the panty-soaked/broner crowd at the box office. I have faith it will
No joke, the first time I saw the trailer I thought “Wait, isn’t JGL in this? Who the eff is THAT dude?”. It took me a few seconds. I’ve never claimed to be smartest around.
I had the same reaction. I hadn’t read anything addressing the make-up until about a week ago & had just assumed he’d suffered some kind of “Parkourcycle-related accident” on his last movie & this was as good as modern plastic surgery could make him look
for a second i honestly thought it was an entirely different actor who looked alot like JGL but slightly more mongoloid.
The makeup is surprisingly non-distracting. JGL clearly studied Bruce Willis. His embodyment of him goes beyond the makeup and it’s pretty impressive.
I hear the original inspiration for this was back in 2000 when Rian Johnson saw The Kid and spent the whole movie wanting Willis to kill that annoying butterball.
That wise-cracking baby raised by Kirstie Alley and John Travolta grows up to be professional time-traveling killer? Sounds about right.
My biggest issue, and I dug it overall, is the whole “closing of the loop”. You mention it in your review, so I don’t think it’s spoilery, but why do the loopers have to kill their own selves? This sets up a tension / dichotomy that is also completely artificial. Just have someone else close the loop, why does it matter?
Still, an awesome watch. Peoples should watch.
This problem also confused me whilst watching. It spawned the thought of ‘if JGL had all this silver stashed even though we see him in a fancy car and apartment, are all loopers this wealthy?’
I can only speculate because they didn’t explain it in the movie, but if you closed someone else’s loop, you wouldn’t know who’s loop you closed. And the person who’s loop you closed would not know it, and would not know when his loop would be closed in the future.
By making it concrete (30 years) and clear (the payoff), it might be more appealing for someone to become a looper.
If you’re down on your luck and you’re being recruited as a looper, a lifespan guaranteed to be at least 30 years and full of money is better than ‘do this job for us and by the way you can be killed at any time and you won’t know when that is’.
The simple answer is that you have to close your own loop to collect your payout and to know that your loop has been closed. If someone else closed your loop, there would be no incentive for them to give your gold. Also, as matty pointed out, no one would know that their loop had been closed and that their contract had indeed expired.
Why do they need to know the contract is expired? Unless you are completely banking on the idea that these guys are going to have the same attitudes about life at 60 that they do at 30.
Did anyone eat Fruit Loops in the film? Fruit Loopers. I’m amazing.
miatas are cool always
Sold.
This followed by closing time and Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One on TCM at 3:30 AM should rewire me completely. My body is ready.
Thoughts:
1. I concur with the general message of this review. Most refreshing movie I’ve seen since Drive. It’s nice to see someone else with Nolan-level ambition/ballsiness/originality, minus the annoying Nolan-isms (uninteresting characters, lack of humor, etc.)
2. JGL KILLED. Dude’s gonna be a bonafide movie star, I know it. I’d go as far as to say he made a more likable Bruce Willis than Bruce Willis did. Which brings me to…
3. SPOILERS KIND-OF: The only problem I had with this movie had nothing to do with any time travel haziness (which was debated extensively with my compadres after watching it), but rather that fucking scene where Bruce Willis kills the mob. Like, all of them. I get that he’s Bruce Willis, but come on. That whole sequence felt like Bruce Willis went up to Johnson with a draft of the script and said, “this is really cool, man, but I’m not signing anything unless there’s a scene where I kill a ton of people and leave unscathed. You know, make it more Bruce Willis-y.”
Perhaps the story was secretly Primer-esque and he came back over and over again until he got it right.
To me, it seemed like the ‘present day’ mobsters were portrayed as being kind of inept and silly. Bruce, in any form, seems to have the know how and ability to fuck shit up when left in a room filled with better guns than everyone else.
“I mean, he is ridiculously cute, but still, you’re telling me you wouldn’t let a guy who travels back in time kill Hitler because Hitler just happened to be a cute kid?”
Hitler’s antics and World War II sped up equality for minorities in North America and the process that comes with it by decades. So yeah, you can’t have him killer Hitler.
Not to mention that there is a good chance that a puppet of Stalin might have taken his place. Or someone who had all of Hitler’s anger but none of his insanity.
My friend was an extra in this movie. I haven’t seen it you, but if you see a short, petite blonde with sizable knockers and a snake that is probably her.
A snake? As in she’s just walkin’ around with a python, or are we looking for a transvestite?
Just a snake. I would be learning something new about her if there was a penis.
My guess it was in the strip-club scene but there were so many broads with tits, I don’t remember seeing any snake.
RE: SPOILERS
Yeah, the favorite stripper thing is a big ol’ coincidence, but I think they implied that the weaselly dude found Old Joe because he was checking security cams around the drainage ditch he was last seen at? It was the scene with the weasel guy listening to a scanner
At first, I thought this was about Bruce Willis going back in time to meet young John Travolta and save him from fucking his career up and looking like an elderly woman. But then I saw it, and it wasn’t that. Still really good though.
***SPOILER***
If a someone from the future that ends up never existing kills someone in the past, are the really dead?
Spoiler:
I really didn’t like this movie. First half was okay, but the second half was just was too M. Night Shamalyan-y for me. In the scene with the kid and the dad from Raising Hope all I could think was “I SEE DEAD PEOPLE”
The whole thing with Bruce Willis killing kids was just weird. Really everything with Emily Blunt and the Rainman kid was just shitty.
The whole movie should have been JGL and Bruce Willis running from the mob or whatever that thing was. It would have been so much better.
Oh, and Miatas are awesome.
SPOILER: I think you missed the whole plot. You did get that the rainman kid was the future devilspawn, right? And that’s why Bruce Willis was hunting children?
Did you see Terminator?
If I could travel back in time and kill myself before I sat through this mess I would strong consider it.
So basically I need to go see this movie asap, because this review confused the SHIT outta me. What I thought I knew about this movie, I don’t.
The marketing merely implies a plot device, not the plot itself, which was a brilliant move.
SPOILER:
Maybe JGL doesn’t believe what Bruce Willis tells him. For all he knows, Bruce Willis is the rainmaker and he’s come back in time to kill the kid that will eventually kill him. Or send him back to close his loop.
JGL doesn’t want to believe that he’ll became so callus that he’ll want to kill kids and wants to find a way around it. He knows can change the future.
I had to get up and take a dump when they explained the kids and the map, but going by what my wife said, yeah, the hooker thing was a weird coincidence. Maybe I have to see it again to see if there were any subtle hints on that one.
SPOILER:
————————-
I liked the movie, but the most glaring hole was that Emily Blunt knew what Loopers were without any explanation how she knows. I get that the strippers know because they are insiders, but if most people in 2040 know Loopers exist, even hot moms out in farms in the middle of nowhere, shouldn’t this affect the future somehow? Like, perhaps the govt will be more aware that when people go missing, the past is where they went. Or that the professor x baby is just the first in a long line of professor x babies who will one day cause anarchy, so they must be sought out?
Also, couldn’t JGL have shot himself in the foot or something? All he needed to do was slow himself down.
I had a similar thought to you with JGL shooting himself in the hand or foot to slow down Bruce Willis. The problem with that is he’d have to make sure to blow whatever appendage he shoots clean off. If he just shoots his hand or foot and only makes a flesh wound, it would just appear as a scar on BW. That’s why maybe the foot wouldn’t have worked, but shooting himself in the hand with whichever hand BW had the gun in might have slowed him down a bit, but then of course BW could have just picked up the gun with the other hand while JGL was still having to deal with the present pain.
I figured she knew about loopers like she knew about the drops. She had been through some shady shit before she went back to the farm to care for psycho kid.
…Sorry it just seemed like something they did not need to explain. She did explain she was doing horrible shit so her sister took her kid. It didnt need more detail. Like the whole thing with the Vagrants and the Solar cars, it wasn’t beaten over your head with explanation, you could just piece together what was up with it.
Emily Blunt did make references to her character’s past. I just figured she was a prostitute or ran around with that kind of crowd.
I really enjoyed Looper for the simple fact that it makes you think. In a lot of ways, it totally wasn’t the movie I expected. I went into it expecting a far more action packed thriller. It actually was fairly light on the “action”, opting more for an insane amount of tension, which isn’t a bad thing at all.
movie was super legit.
Spoiler
********
The kid was really cute, but JGL formed a quick bond with the kid: he was smart, funny, and I’ll go as far as to say that JGL saw something of himself inside the kid.
What initially motivated JGL to keep the kid safe was the realization that whatever his future was, he was innocent _now_. The kid was extremely scared of his own powers and behaviour.
It certainly wasn’t his fault that he was born with his abilities.
What _ultimately_ made JGL choose to save the kid and kill himself was the possibility that the kid’s life would be different than JGL’s, who knew what it was to grow up lost, with no one to care for him or guide him.
Bingo was his name-o. That’s exactly where my head was at with JGL and the Kid. I thought Rian did a spot on job of avoiding obvious tropes and at least poking fun at the ones he couldnt avoid like he did through Willis when he said he “didnt want to talk about time travel shit”.
The significance for the blunderbuss is that it has a short range. So if someone manages to run away they’d have to be chased down. Past what, 15 yards and you’re in the clear. SO when Paul Dano’s character freezes he can’t really do anything once his future self gets far enough away, setting everything in motion.
Also it creates two different classes of criminals. The loopers and the gats.
The first point is a good one except for the part about boneheaded gangsters, the one-footed doofus with the gat was clutching at straws by that point.
Sympathy for the kid is justified at the end when you see him reign in his rage-monster for the first time, and Joe realizes that it’s him that sets the kid down the path of evil. I might have missed it but was the rainmaker really a bad guy? He sounded more like a Punisher style antihero.
Indeed. His mother was killed by a looper. So he takes power of all the cartels in order to start closing all the loops and seek revenge.
In Willis’ timeline, the kid definitely went evil. The other future guy mentioned things like vagrant purges and such. The mother probably wasn’t killed by a Looper, but probably some sort of criminal (or maybe one of the vagrants that kept sneaking onto the farm). Closing all the loops? I dunno. Maybe he was just done with that type of enterprise. Maybe he realized relying on a bunch of junkie fuck ups to see to that sort of thing was really stupid.
I’ve got a question here. If Bruce Willis had killed all those in the club, basically the entire looper operation, what would the Rainmaker have to close? Time travel is a fucking tough one.
It seemed to me that the henchmen Willis wasted at the club were all Gats so I just rolled with that assumption.
My major question about the film was this: So the kid was also super smart in addition to being the baddest TK ever. So when he became The Rainmaker and started closing all the loops, was it just for simple revenge or because he connected the dots between Willis/Joe and JGL/Joe and figured out what the outcome would be/might be?
@surly, it would appear he closed the loops to ensure killing the looper that killed his mom, he obviously didn’t have the identities of all the loopers so he just closed them all.
I agree with everything said here. I didn’t read this until I got to see the movie and I was left with the same feelings and questions.
Always makes me feel a little giddy inside when I overlap the Film Drunk opinions. Oh what’s that? Is that a little teet milk coming out? No turning back now.
Just saw this movie and I have to say I am SHOCKED Vince that you didn’t bitch about the use of the cliche that ruined Super 8 for you:
lol of course the main character has a locket. I don’t know one person in real life who has a picture of their significant other in a locket. Probably the most outdated cliche around… and yet it exists 30-60 years in the future! It wasn’t as corny as how it was used in Super 8, but they did try to Inception it at the end and leave it open-ended since Emily Blunt didn’t open it to see what was inside? Whatevs.
Pretty good movie overall, though they tried to cram every major sci-fi theme into it all at once. Literally each act went from a “what would you do if you met your future self?” movie to a “if you know the future, would you change it?” movie to a “nature vs. nurture” movie. Kinda jarring and it made the ending kinda meh for me.
Oh and I have the biggest crush in the universe on Emily Blunt. She made The Adjustment Bureau tolerable even though her character sucked and was basically a sexy Macguffin. But god damn was she hot here again (and her character was more likable this time around). Also her sex scene was pretty ridiculous because I really wanted her to bust out some sort of FUTURE DILDO instead… DON”T YOU SEE, YOU DON’T HAVE TO BONE HIM! THE CHOICE IS YOURS!!! *breaks out future rabbit*
At least they didn’t try to shoehorn in a Terminiator situation and have her pregnant at the end as some sort of stupid metaphor that your life goes on even when you die.
**PANTY SPOILERS**
Great review sir. The movie is an exercise in “holy fuck that’s awesome,” so much so that you’re willing to ignore the time travel gaffes until the very end where plot holes finally overshadow the emotional payoff. I understand the decision was made to have the characters live in the “present” but Young Joe’s “sacrifice” in the end pretty much means the whole movie never actually happened. The Rainmaker’s douchebaggery has to exist uncaused by Old Joe since Old Joe is responding to the Rainmaker’s douchebaggery (i.e. Old Joe killing your sister’s sister can’t be the cause of the Rainmaker’s reign of terror in the first place). If Young Joe’s emotional changes happen at the farm, then the bitter Old Joe he’s fighting in the present would, at the very least, lose his motivation to avenge the wife he never had. Etc. Etc. Etc. I was fine with accepting that Seth couldn’t get through life with half a body because cutting up Young Seth piece by piece was fucking rad but that wasn’t getting in the way of an emotional payoff. Like Nolan, as long as the emotional payoff is strong, the details can be overlooked. Looper does that effectively all the way until the end. That being said, it’s pretty fucking good.
I’ll give you the first point about the hooker’s son coincidence lameness – but the second one, in terms of plot and him letting cute Hitler live, is directly related to their own loop of cause and effect. He saw that he was the direct cause of the Rain Maker becoming evil (rather than just being a little shit whose tantrums got a tad out of hand) – his paradox is what set him off and made him start closing loops in the first place. If he hadn’t done it he would have got away and so it would have gone on and on and on.
How was he the direct cause of the Rainmaker becoming evil? The Rainmaker killed Bruce Willis’ wife before he ever went back and tried to kill The Rainmaker, right? Because his already-dead wife would be the only reason for him to ever try to kill The Rainmaker in the first place, yes? Ugh, brain hurts.
Right. Old Joe killing The Rainmaker’s mother cannot be the cause of the Rainmaker’s evil reign because Old Joe kills the The Rainmaker’s mother in response to The Rainmaker’s evil reign. The Rainmaker’s motivation has to exist independently of Joe which is why the time paradoxes ultimately overwhelm the movie’s climax. Unless Joe’s just kind of dumb and turned the blunderbuss on himself in a fool’s attempt at a noble sacrifice.
And I disagree with the “killing Hitler” premise as a weakness. Young Joe had no emotional connection to the Rainmaker of the future, just the stories Old Joe told him. One of the strengths of the movie is that Socratic “you can’t teach knowledge” idea that no matter how life changing his future wife might have been to him at that point in his life, she means nothing in the past because he hasn’t had that experience yet. To him, the Rainmaker is nothing more than a young boy he’s bonded with. That’s why Old Joe, as hard as it is, is willing to kill these young children. Young Joe doesn’t have that experience. If you’re living in 1899, with no connection to the Nazis and a time traveler comes to you and says, “we need to kill this precocious ten-year-old because in the future he’s going to be a horrible monster” given that you have no emotional precedent for Nazi Germany (and decades removed from WW1 even) I think killing said child is a hell of a lot harder under those circumstances. And it’s certainly not unreasonable to refuse given the circumstances.
Whatever man, I kill that kid without a second thought like the Wanted loom told me to.
Somebody pass the straws – I’m gonna crack this bitch.
HAHAHA.
“Hey, guys, anyone else think this whole textile-based assassination forecast might be, I don’t know, shaky at best? Far be it from me to question the existence of a sentient loom and all, but, just sayin’ it seems a little convenient.”
“Cram it rook, I can’t hear Jeff Dunham and his hilarious magic living wooden friends.”
Hipster 12 Monkeys. Awesome hipster 12 Monkeys.
This film is pure pretense and bullshit – you have to buy into so many logical inconsistencies in the script that if examined it falls apart completely. You’ve all been duped.