Looper

Looper

Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis, Emily Blunt, Paul Dano

Directed by Rian Johnson

It's 2047, and thirty years from then time travel would have been invented and immediately outlawed, and five of the most powerful crime lords have access to them.  They send marks back in time so Loopers - people hired by the crime lords - can kill them in the past.

For Looper Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), life is good.  He's getting rich off killing people, and he has no issues with it.  He spends his money on women, drugs and living the high life, until he discovers it's his turn to "close the loop," meaning kill your future self.

In Joe's case, he's unable to kill his future self (Bruce Willis), who manages to escape.  Now Joe's bosses are out to kill them both, while young Joe is trying to figure out a sinister plot that the older Joe warns will cause death and destruction in the future. 

The older Joe is in search of a child who will later turn into the Rainmaker, an extremely powerful telekinetic who will cause the deaths of many, but the young Joe wants to protect the child when he discovers he belongs to Sara (Emily Blunt), a girl Joe falls for.  With the future in jeopardy, the question is raised - who is really good, and who is really bad?

Director Rian Johnson is known for his highly cerebral films (see another collaboration between Johnson and Gordon-Levitt in the brilliant underground film "Brick" to see his true masterpiece), and "Looper" is no different.  Having a film dealing with time travel has a different set of difficulties, as you have to carefully maneuver yourself so as to not raise paradoxical issues that could take away from the story.

Unfortunately there is one pressing paradox in the film - how young Joe and old Joe can share the same space in the same time, since technically they're the same person, it should be impossible by the laws of physics.

Then again, I'm no physics expert, so I still really enjoyed it.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt delivers a surprising performance here, if only for the fact that it hardly looks like him.  He underwent a complete transformation to look more like Bruce Willis, but to me ends up looking like Edward Norton.  I don't know why they didn't just cast Edward Norton in that case, but I'm glad they chose Gordon-Levitt, because he always gives amazing performances (minus that little hiccup called "G.I. Joe").  Bruce Willis is in his element here and Emily Blunt takes a more gritty turn than her previous outings such as "Sunshine Cleaning" and "The Devil Wears Prada."  

Great action and a great storyline that will possibly make your brain hurt, but in a good way.

My Rating: A-