Looper – minor spoilers

Looper asks a lot of its audience. It asks them to accept its strong central premise – that in the future, a machine is invented to send things back in time, but outlawed and used only by criminals to send back men they want murdered, which becomes the job of ‘loopers’ in a gritty near-future. It then asks them to believe that someone in that future thinks it’s a good idea to make loopers execute themselves to ‘close the loop’ rather than, y’know, sending them to one of numerous other loopers to do the job as any sensible person would. It then sneaks in the idea of telekinetic mutants, which is a good bit harder to swallow, and by the end presents us with a very muddled sense of time travel, where you have to accept elements of both linear and multi-world possibilities, Back To The Future-style ways for actions in the present to affect a person from the future, and a mind-boggling final scenario in which the only way the mysterious Rainmaker comes into being is if main character Joe goes back in time, but his going back in time sets into motion events that mean there will be no Rainmaker. Part of this is the conception of a time-traveller faced with contradictions from his past self having his memories gradually reshaped – which means that at the end of the film, when Joe has the revelation he does, really there should have been no need to do what he did, and everyone should have just dropped their guns and maybe initiated the awesome adventure of going around in a crime-fighting gang making sure the kid was brought up right. That would definitely have made for a better film that what we got, which was largely two people with a fascinating relationship staying very far away from one another.

Looper isn’t really for picking apart the intricacies of the timelines, though. It’s mostly for enjoying as an action flick, and in that, it mostly works – other than one very far-fetched scene where Bruce Willis takes out an entire crime syndicate by shooting through a doorway at something offscreen – amongst the worst such action shots I’ve ever seen. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is likeable even though his character is so unappealing, which makes the film work, and it’s astonishing that it becomes believable that little Tommy Solomon could grow up to be Bruce Willis. Some moments have Levitt look very odd, like his eyebrows have been badly darkened, but others – especially when he is being interrogated by his boss, or face-to-face with him in the diner – have him look uncannily like Willis. The former may be all angles, hair and the way he holds his face, but the latter looks like some digital manipulation of noses and chins has gone on. Either way, it works far better than I expected.

On a final tangential note, the D-Box moving chairs are hilarious to sit behind. The little synchronised wobbles were funny, but when a series of explosions happened, the chairs did a brilliantly funny synchronised dance together. Distracting but fun!