LOOPER

Stars: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis, Emily Blunt, Paul Dano, Jeff Daniels, Noah Segan, Piper Perabo, Pierce Gagnon and Summer Qing.
Writer/Director: Rian Johnson.

Rating: 4.5/5

Looper mashes up tropes from disparate genres that have no right being in the same vision: the hit-man noir, the demon-seed kid-horror, time-travel malarkey. Yet writer/director Rian Johnson, in only his third film and first to afford the 39 year-old some budgetary freedom, has conjured a supremely well-crafted science-fiction thriller that fully delivers on the promise of its out-there premise.

Johnson, whose stylish framing and character-driven self-penned plots have enlivened small scale cult items Brick and The Brothers Bloom, works his huge canvas expertly. Delivering one of the most accomplished visual treats of the year, however, pales next to his achievements as a storyteller; Looper is both a cracking piece of high-brow genre entertainment and, most surprisingly, a satisfyingly emotional journey for both Johnson’s characters and audience.

Though disinclined to give away any of the intricate plotting (and certain that any effort would only serve to confuse rather than enlighten), it is no spoiler to reveal that the film revolves around the back-and-forth realities of Joe (a superb Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and his life as a ‘looper’. A brash young breed of hired killers, the loopers carry out the dirty work of gangsters who rule the criminal underworld 30 years hence. Time-travel has been invented and the bad guys send troublemakers back to a pre-determined point in the present, to be eliminated and disposed of by the loopers.

Despite being cold-blooded and calculated in every respect, Joe is not prepared for his old-self (Bruce Willis, perfectly exploiting his ‘damaged action-hero’ persona) to materialise one day. The split-second crack in young Joe’s confidence gives old Joe the room to move, and soon young Joe is being targeted by his murderous boss Abe (Jeff Daniels) for failing to ‘close the loop’. Meanwhile, old Joe is off on his own vendetta – to kill the young boy, Cid (Pierce Gagnon), who will grow into the man who alters Joe’s life irreparably. Of course, Cid’s resilient single-mom Sara (Emily Blunt) has her own pov on the imminent death of her paranormally-gifted child.

Johnson balances all the time-travel/parallel lives intricacies with a remarkably assured hand. Like Christoper Nolan’s Inception and The Wachowski’s The Matrix (and, in the panthenon of great time travel films, Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys), Looper takes some big risks with its narrative but, ultimately, makes its audience feel very smart by never leaving them behind. Johnson then builds upon that audience faith with a slowed-down mid-section that further fleshes out his lead characters and a final half-hour which rocked the house (in itself, the closing of a loop, as it brings the film back to the technical giddiness of its razzle-dazzle opening sequence).

Bound to inspire heated geek-debate by those inclined to question the logic of time travel principles, Johnson needn’t worry about any post-viewing backlash; his film offers just enough ambiguity to inspire conversation but more than enough smarts to cover its cinematic backside. Tough, tense, tender and trippy, Looper rewards buffs for sticking by genre efforts despite a lot of derivative works. It is the kind of film we hope to find every time we make that trip to the movies.