Rian Johnson’s ‘Looper’ brings us to Kansas
City 2042, a part of time and space that has become something of a dumping
ground to be used by crime syndicates of the future. The logical choice for
future mobsters is now to hire assassins in the past (bear with me), and
present them their targets by means of by-then-invented time travel.
It is the job of the loopers, who count Joe
(Joseph Gordon-Levitt) among their number, to execute those who appear in front
of them and dispose of the body so as to leave no trace in the future.
But there is a catch; as Gordon-Levitt’s narration
informs us, this new technology is so very illegal that said organisations
cannot risk their loopers coming back to haunt them, and a time will come where
they must execute their thirty-year-older selves. When the time does come for
our protagonist to end his own loop and literally face his own mortality he
hesitates, facilitating the escape of his older self (Bruce Willis) into a
world he should not inhabit.
Now Joe is well aware of the dire consequences
of his inaction for himself (and by this I do actually mean himself), and sets about tracking down
his 2072 counterpart who also has a grizzly task in mind to put his own house
in order.
Johnson provides the audience with a measured
glimpse into the lives of 2042’s criminal underbelly – not so much that new and
interesting technology is thrust at us indiscriminately, but enough to satisfy
us that there is substance, a concreteness, to his futuristic city. On this
front it succeeds where the likes of ‘I, Robot’ have failed; scratch beneath
the surface and you find just the amount of societal and technological
advancements to satisfy the conventions of the genre, such as the eye-drop
drugs with which the city is rampant, but no affectations included for their
own sake.
Gordon-Levitt’s Joe is a conflicted man; embracing
the perks of the life of a small-time mobster whilst also preparing for
retirement away from the city. It is testament to his performance, as well as
the work of Johnson’s make-up and CGI teams, that his scenes with Willis really
induce belief that before you stand two slices of one temporal entity. In
particular, one scene in the men’s (or man’s) favourite diner sees Willis’
trademark glare emanate from both sides of the table simultaneously as their
diverging motives become clear, throwing up all kinds of philosophical dilemmas
in the process. Again, the trick is for the complexity and to impress rather
than to overwhelm, and Johnson – no stranger to the complicated narrative after
his labyrinthine debut feature ‘Brick’ - gets the balance just right.
The success of the science fiction blockbuster
often depends not upon the intelligibility or otherwise of the content, but
rather the sincerity with which the material is presented – and ‘Looper’
undoubtedly succeeds on the second count if not necessarily the first. The
narrative accelerates violently following Gordon-Levitt’s opening exposition meaning
that any metaphysical concern are never more than fleeting, indeed the silence
that greets the end credits emphasises what a relentless, twisting ride Johnson
has just conducted – this is decidedly action-led story-telling.
Most surprising is that, despite an
escalating sci-fi plot that eventually owes as much to ‘Chronicle’ as ‘Twelve
Monkeys’, the film nevertheless displays commendable restraint in not allowing
its concept to overrun the story. It tempers its visual tricks and cat-and-mouse
plot with a creeping moral centrepiece, so that, by the climax, any conceptual
troubles you might have experienced are left very much in the past.
