In 2072, when the mob wants to get rid of someone, the target is sent 30 years into the past, where a hired gun awaits. Someone like Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who one day learns the mob wants to ‘close the loop’ by transporting back Joe’s future self (Bruce Willis.)
Written and directed by Rian Johnson and co-produced by Gordon-Levitt, Looper is one of the better time travel movies of recent times. Though set in 2042, the staging in Kansas is very reminiscent of the depression and the western gun battle films of that era. Not even mobile phones seem to have survived the next 30 years though hologram type screens are in use and some of our next generation have acquired the use of ‘TK’ – the ability to make the world move around you.
One of the great failings of Inception, the most highly recognised of the recent time travel genre, was it simply asked too much of most of its patrons and for those it left behind it resorted to silly action sequences to keep you engaged. Johnson and his crew have taken extra care to ensure there are clues all long as to what’s happening – the use of the somewhat bleak depression era and a humble corn field help ensure there isn’t too much happening, technologically at least, to create confusion in their audience’s minds.
Gordon-Levitt is great (though often with excess make-up) and Willis is well cast as an aging and tired warrior of past physical and emotional battles (though one has to suspend in one’s mind that these two are meant to be the same person just thirty years apart in age.) Emily Blunt as the struggling farm owner, Sara, is a delight and Jeff Daniels as the unhinged Abe is well cast. Pierce Gagnon as Cid, Abe’s forebear and Sara’s child also does an excellent job.
The cinematography is slick, the effects excellent and story is as plausible as time travel movies can allow.
If you were disappointed that you couldn’t buy into the Inception hype two years ago because you couldn’t work out what the heck was going on, then don’t let that deter you from seeing what will be rightly regarded as one of the best films of the year.
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