Straight to the point:
“This years Matrix” if by “Matrix” you mean “disappointing sci-fi mess with delusions of grandeur”.
Review:
I should love this film. The trailer blew me away with its images of a dystopian future, Bruce Willis doing time travel (no more monkey business!) and Joseph Gordon Levitt doing…oh my god what’s wrong with his face?
It was therefore with no small amount of excitement that I sat down to watch what has been described to me as the sleeper hit of the year. Skip forward 118 minutes later and I was left with that feeling you get when you meet an old school friend who used to be quite attractive but now has a hook for a hand and a face ravaged by years of crystal meth abuse. Sorrow for the wasted potential of something that started out so promising.
Looper, in a nutshell, is the story of Joe, played at various times in his life by a heavily made-up Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce “I’m still a credible action hero” Willis. Joe is a looper, an assassin that kills and disposes of people sent back in time by a futuristic criminal organisation from a point where time travel has been invented. Everything is hunky-dory in Joe’s life, he has money, drugs, hookers, a steady job…hunky-dory that is until his future self is sent back to meet his demise at the end of Joe’s blunderbuss and Joe fails to pull the trigger.
This is the set-up and, as long as there are no further questions, it stands up fine. The problem is that you can’t ask your audience, especially the intelligent good-looking geeks at whom this film is targeted, not to want to know what the chuff is going on. Questions like “why don’t the future criminals just kill these dudes in the future instead of sending them back?” and “Surely by not killing his future self Joe instantly changes his own timeline meaning that he wouldn’t be sent back to kill himself so the timeline would remain unaltered and why is my nose bleeding?” are answered as vaguely as possible, even at one point to the extent that Bruce Willis loudly advises his younger self that it doesn’t matter and to stop trying to work it out. I mean he may as well wink at the camera and tell us to turn our brains off for a bit.
Visually the film definitely more hit than miss. The cityscapes are jaw-dropping and the atmosphere of a 2040’s America still suffering after thirty years of recession is very well realised. Technology appears to have festered here with criminals using either cobbled-together blunderbusses or oversized “gat” revolvers in their nefarious pursuits and dirty solar panels adorn every car’s bonnet, their chassis’ a mess of wires and scavenged machinery. The technology itself raises further questions though, regarding the inconsistencies on show here. As well as the solar-cars and some electric vehicles, characters often ride around on flying bikes seemingly built around a single jet engine. I know, it’s poking holes for the sake of poking holes but what, you have fuel for personal jet engines but your cars have to be powered by something else? Come on.
For me, the highlight of the film is Joseph Gordon Levitt’s performance. He is in my opinion one of the finest actors of the moment who, to his infinite credit, is inclined towards more interesting sci-fi projects like this, Inception, The Dark Knight Rises, etc. In Looper he once again proves to be the most watchable thing in the entire movie and, in this case, is the only justification for the positive praise it has garnered elsewhere. In order to make him look like a young Bruce Willis he has been given a prosthetic eyebrow ridge and nose making him look more like the lovechild of a Bajoran and an owl than an aging John McClane which, on anyone else this would be enough, but JGL has obviously put a ton of work into pulling off a pitch perfect Willis impression. Every subtle eye movement, every half smile, every line he delivers is pure Bruce. There’s one scene in particular where young Joe and old Joe are chatting in a café and it’s quite fun watching the two men trying to act like Bruce Willis. I think JGL does a better job.
What else?
Oh wait, did I mention that everyone in this film has telekinesis? Ok, so it’s only around 10% of the world population, but that 10% just happen to be every character in this film who isn’t named Joe. There is a rule in storytelling that says an audience is only willing to suspend their disbelief enough for one magical or fantastical concept. It’s the reason why no one in Jurassic Park was an alien or the X-Men weren’t also killer robots from the future (either of which admittedly would have been awesome) – you can only have one crazy thing before you lose the audience’s connection. And it’s not even like these people having telekinesis furthers the plot. There is zero reason why anyone in this film needs super powers – if anything the film makes more sense without them.
In all the effect is like watching the first half of Back to the Future and then sticking on the end of Akira. This would have been a great time travel film or a great …erm…telekinesis film, but having both means that neither concept is given enough room to develop and ends up with you wishing you could go back in time watch Matrix again instead.
Glad someone agrees, total let down of a movie.