Looper

I knew four things about Looper prior to watching this movie from the few things I accidentally read about the film.

1. The Title
2. Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt were in it playing the same person from different times.
3. It involved Time Travel
4. It was very highly praised.

That is all I allowed myself to know about the movie, mainly because of the two in the middle. I love both these actors and almost everything they've been in. I absolutely love Time Travel stories. With these two ingredients, I had a feeling this movie had the potential to be a really good movie.

All I can say is that if you haven't seen Looper, watch Looper, those four things are thing things are the only things you need to know, the movie will do the rest.

Otherwise, I'm doing a pretty in depth review, there might be some spoilers.

Looper takes place in a distant, but also not so distant future where the mob in the even farther future has control of a time machine. Since disposing of bodies is incredibly difficult, they send people they need killed back in time to hitmen called Loopers. Loopers execute the target and dispose of the body, a body that never existed.

Joe (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is one such Looper. He has a pretty good thing going. He's seen highly upon by the Gang leader, Abe. (played surprisingly by Jeff Daniels, man its good to see him in stuff, he's damn good).

But then one day his target is late. When he finally arrives, he attacks Joe and gets away. This was Joe from the future.

There's this great element of the movie's universe where the gangs from the future don't want anything tied to them. So they do what is called closing the Loop. They give their hitmen a lot of money, give them thirty years to live the rest of their life, and then when that 30 year mark comes, they send them back and have their former selfs kill them.

Its brutal and its fascinating!

Well future Joe comes back, attacks Levitt Joe and runs away. This future Joe is none other than John McClane, Bruce Willis.

So Willis Joe escapes and Levitt Joe must now find his older self and kill him before the mob can get to him.

That's as much plot as you really need to know for this movie. I must stress, if you haven't seen this movie, this is all you need to know. Go see Looper! The movie will do the rest.

After this, I will be going into spoilers.

You've been warned.

Now there are a lot of directions they could have gone with the rest of this movie. When Bruce Willis runs off and then there's a cut back to the timeline that brought Bruce Willis to where he is presently, I thought they were going to go down the route of the movie Next (That movie nobody remembers with Nic Cage?

Not a horrible movie, but my god that hair!

They could have just made this a cat and mouse movie where Levitt Joe chases Willis Joe through a maze of bad guys and an action filled blood bath. 

The way I thought they were going to go was have the two team up and fight the bad guys and change their future together. It'd be pretty awesome to have Levitt and Willis fighting the mob together in an action filled blood bath. 

But that's not the direction they went and its really interesting. 

Willis Joe decides that the best way he can have the perfect life, free from his job as a Looper is to kill the man who has been killing off all the Loopers in the future in the past. A man called the Rainmaker

Basically he's going Terminator on children. 

But here's the great thing about that. In Terminator, it was the bad guys going after the good guys to change the course of history for evil purposes with evil means (mainly murder). 

But in this film, Willis Joe, a good guy is going after the bad guy (as a kid mind you) to change the course of history for good purposes. The only similarity is that it is also with evil means (mainly murder). 

This is actually where things get kind of sad. Willis Joe is willing to go to all lengths to make sure his life is the way he wants it to be. All the way to the point of killing children. He has three children that were born on the same day as the Rainmaker. In order to be sure, he must kill all three children. 

This character who is reformed, he turns up being a good guy on the straight path doing what he thinks is right, but also at the same time losing his humanity. Its great. 

And then you've got this fucking kid. 

One of the locations Willis Joe is looking for one of these three kids is a farm run by Emily Blunt... I'll get to her in a second.

But her son is a very special kid. In this not so distant future, there's a few people who mutated to have telekinetic abilities. It is realized that this kid has stronger telekinetic abilities than anybody alive.

What's great is that you can totally see this kid becoming evil, even though you've never seen or been introduced to the Rainmaker. With the stories told of him and your own imagination, this kid fits that description perfectly.

But at the same time the kid is just adorable. I have to hand it to this kid (Pierce Gagnon) he's good, at least for a 9 year old. Usually kids annoy me, but this kid was this weird combination that just makes you think it could go either way. He could either turn out to be the devil incarnate, or he could be the greatest superhero ever. This was a phenomenal choice.

And then you have Emily Blunt, who I did not know was in this movie. She was just a pleasant surprise.

Emily Blunt is very quickly becoming one of my favorite actresses of today, based on her performances in Edge of Tomorrow, Into the Woods and now this. The woman can act.

If we're following the Terminator analogy, she's very much the Sarah Connor of the story (again very different as there is no robots). She's got her own backstory, her relationship with her son, its just phenomenal. Again its fun to see something like this but at the same time see it done very, very differently.

I feel like this movie could have been split into two halves, one is the first half mainly about Levitt Joe playing this cat and mouse game with Willis Joe and the other half could be this Terminator storyline. Some might criticize the movie for this sudden change in direction, but I thought it was all brilliantly done.

But the parts of the movie that really stole it for me, was Willis and Levitt. They wanted Levitt to look like a much younger Bruce Willis. They could have just figured out similar ticks and such but instead they put on prosthetics that made him look a little bit like 30 year old Bruce Willis.

I'm not saying its the best prosthetic job in the world, but I'm not one for prosthetics in aging that often anyway so anything is going to look weird to me. For me it was fifty fifty, sometimes I really saw it, a fun resemblance, and then other times it was more distracting. I love the effort and creativity that went into it and for me, it kind of makes the movie even more memorable.

Aside from that, both their acting was fun. Levitt is slowly becoming one of the best actors of my day. Willis is always a good time but this actually made me feel for him. I actually saw Willis Joe losing his humanity instead of usual Bruce Willis movies where he looks like he's just Bruce Willis hanging out on a set.

The visuals were phenomenal. The action was intense and very, very good. The story was just creative. And the ending while it wasn't exactly what I wanted to happen, I don't think this movie could have ended in any other way. 

I love movies that require people on the internet to create charts to explain how a movie's timeline goes. While this one wasn't incredibly complicated, it was incredibly necessary. 

For the last time, you could probably watch the movie still without spoiling too much if you stop reading right now... I mean if you've gotten this far you've probably already seen the movie or you don't give a shit... so I'll keep going. 

Time Travel isn't the main component of this film. Sure its a big part of it, but this isn't necessarily a story about Time Travel as it is about the characters in the film. This movie's use of time travel is some of the greatest uses I've ever seen. 

One of the best scenes in the movie is when Joe's friend lets his Looper go. The older self gets away but Joe's friend is captured and tortured in order to get the older self to come back. The way they do this is mutilate his friend's body. The effects of the torture don't hurt the older self but they have their effects. For example, you get your finger cut off in the present, older self's finger will vanish... and they do this with almost all his limbs. It was gruesome, disturbing, and one of the best scenes I've seen filmed in a long time. 

But what is also interesting is the concept of the Rainmaker or the young boy Cid. There's only

rumors of him. There are the rumors that his mother was killed by a man. The Rainmaker saw this and sought revenge on the man and all Loopers as he knew he was a Looper.

At the end, Willis Joe is going after Cid with the intent of killing him. Levitt Joe realizes that by trying to stop the cycle, Willis Joe has only made the cycle happen. Perhaps it wasn't him before, perhaps there used to be a different way the Rainmaker came to be who he is but by Willis Joe attempting to change it, he becomes that cause.

Levitt Joe realizes there is no way to put the cycle in a different direction, it can only be broken.

So Levitt Joe shoots himself and dies.

Willis Joe disappears from existence, and Cid and his mother survive safely, presumptuously living a happy life where Cid becomes a good guy, using his powers for good and not for evil.

Its not the ending I necessarily wanted, but by going down this route of introducing Cid and his mother, this was the only way this movie could end. And introducing Cid and his mother pushes this movie past being just a good sci fi time travel movie, it pushes this movie past being just a good action movie, it pushes it to be a really great film.

Its still very early, I did just see the movie today so its too early, but Looper might just be one of my favorite movies of all time. I know that's a bold claim, but there's something about this film that just hits all my criteria for an instant classic. Again, I may be over selling this at this point but I really, REALLY liked this film.

But those are my thoughts on Looper. What did you think? Comment and Discuss below! You can also follow me on Twitter and get updates on when new blog posts are available @cmhaugen24