Looper (2012)
"It is going to happen to you!" "To YOU. It is not going to happen to ME."
Dir. Rian Johnson Rated: R Run Time: 1 hour 59 min
Where can I watch? Netflix
When I first moved to LA after graduating college in 2008, I had the opportunity to write for an up-and-coming entertainment website called Collider.com. Collider is huge now, but at the time it was a single Editor-in-Chief who ran the whole thing out of his apartment (quite well, in fact), and he’d built the reputation of the site up enough that representatives from Collider were routinely invited to attend press junkets, visit film and television sets, and have sit down interviews with actors, writers, and directors. Every once in a while, I’d get to be that representative, and one of those times was an hour long sit down with Rian Johnson. At the time, he had one film to his name, Brick (a Raymond Chandler style noir thriller set in the present day), which had made quite the impact on me, and I was interviewing him about his next film, The Brothers Bloom. Since then, Johnson has gone on to have a massive career, which includes The Knives Out franchise, Star Wars Episode IX: The Last Jedi, creating the excellent not-exactly-Columbo-but-basically-Columbo TV series Poker Face, and directing the Breaking Bad episode “Ozymandias”, which is considered not only the best episode of the series, but perhaps one of the best TV episodes of all time. I remember spending most of the interview fawning over Brick, my 22 year old self unable to suppress the fan boy in me.
Looper exemplifies why I have such affection for Rian Johnson as an auteur. He takes well-worn genres (like, say, murder mysteries, or, in this case, time travel movies) and does one of two things with them: 1) He makes them accessible for a new audience (Brick, for instance, takes the hard boiled detective genre and transposes it to a present day high school in Southern California. The Knives Out franchise takes the Agatha Christie murder mystery formula and modernizes it, giving us comedies wrapped in a compelling mystery (in contrast to Kenneth Branagh’s current Hercule Poirot series, which, while still fun, are far more serious in tone); or 2) He does something new with them (The Last Jedi, a movie that I personally did enjoy quite a bit, is a firmly unique take on the Star Wars formula, however polarizing it may have been for audiences. I also loved The Matrix Resurrections, another movie that refused to play it safe, so many of you may now be questioning my judgement). Looper, to me, falls firmly into the “does something new” category; I don’t see it winning over those who aren’t fans of sci-fi action thrillers, but for those who do enjoy them, it’s a refreshing take on the genre and an execution that delivers a mature, satisfying story wrapped in a near-future aesthetic, and also, thankfully, doesn’t get bogged down in the “rules” that govern its time travel narrative device.
Joe (Joseph Gordon Levitt) is a “Looper”, a mob hitman who kills people from the future. In the present day of the movie (the early 2040s), time travel hasn’t been invented yet, but 30 years later it will be, and will be immediately made illegal. Only the mob uses it, and new crime-solving techniques make murder in the 2070s nearly impossible, so the mob sends those people back to the 2040s to be killed and disposed of by Loopers, where no one would be looking for a body. If the mob decides to kill a Looper, the Looper is asked to handle the murder of their future selves themself, which includes a large payout and a release from their contract, so they are free to live the next 30 years of their life until the mob shows up to take them, send them back to the past to be killed by themselves again, starting the process over, and is appropriately called “closing your loop”. When Joe’s future self (Bruce Willis) arrives for his loop to be closed, Old Joe escapes, which is bad news for young Joe, as Old Joe’s continued existence threatens to blow up the mobs whole time-looping spot.
Looper is part mob movie, part chase movie, and part Terminator/ go-back-in-time-and-kill-baby-Hitler movie. Old Joe has an agenda beyond evading capture, and in theory that agenda makes sense, while in practice it seems downright monstrous. Old Joe’s ultimate plan may have a positive impact on the world, but that’s not why he’s doing it. Old Joe is purely selfish, just like Young Joe is at the start of the movie (Young Joe becomes the vehicle through which we see what happens when a Loop escapes by selling out his friend (Paul Dano), and the results are far more disturbing than the mob-movie-sans-time-travel genre has to offer), but Young Joe still has time to change both himself and the future while Old Joe is only interested in keeping things a way that is most advantageous to him.
Joseph Gordon Levitt wears prosthetics and color contacts in order to look more like someone who could believably become Bruce Willis later in life, and even husks up his voice to sound more like the gravelly action star. He didn’t have to do this, and it takes some getting used to, but eventually I came to think that it strangely kinda works. A diner scene, reminiscent of the famous Al Pacino/Robert De Niro diner scene in Heat, allows JGL and Willis to sit face to face, and, you know what? There’s a resemblance there. Both performances are great, but while JGL has to balance pretending to be Bruce Willis with the emotional weight needed for the story being told, it’s Willis who is free to be himself, imbues Old Joe with a pathos that carries through his desperate journey: we don’t see a ton of Old Joe’s life in the 30 years since his loop was closed, but we see enough to know that getting that life back is the only thing that drives him. Willis hits notes of pain, sorrow, anguish, rage, and even some brief moments of tenderness that makes his on-screen time (despite being considerably less than his co-star) incredibly compelling.
Looper is dark, both in the Kansas City it depicts (which by the early 2040s has become a massive metropolis), and in the ominous future it promises over the next 30 years beyond its starting point. Its characters (with one and a half notable exceptions) are not good people. They’ve done bad things (unforgivable things), with more to come, and any redemption arc they hope to undergo will come with notable asterisks. The story has stakes and weight, and it demonstrates to us that we are dealing with people who do not have a definition of “too far” in how far they are willing to go to get what they want. Jeff Daniels plays a mob underboss, sent from the future to monitor the present, and his relaxed yet bureaucratic psychopathy is emblematic of a world that has become mostly devoid of human kindess. What kindness there is is under constant threat, and it’s a big part of what makes Looper tick.
I generally am not the biggest fan of time travel as a device. It is often used to undo events that change the world of the characters. For instance, in Back to the Future II, the characters go back in time to ensure the events of Back to the Future happens. In Avengers: Endgame, the Avengers go back in time to ensure that the events of Avengers: Infinity War do not happen. It’s essentially a giant “undo” button: did a major character (or dozens of major characters) die? Don’t worry, they’ll be fine soon. Did our heroes paint themselves into a corner with no way out? Don’t worry, they’ll just go back in time and fix it. Looper isn’t interested in letting its characters escape the consequences of their actions; the time travel is instead there to all but ensure they suffer those consequences.