Basically, I love Joseph Gordon-Levitt. If he’s in a movie, I’m pretty sure I’m going to enjoy it more than I might otherwise. Brick, The Lookout, 500 Days of Summer (a movie that depended on you liking him, if Zooey Deschanel is not your cup of tea), 50/50, Inception.
Also, Bruce Willis: he’s smug, he’s annoying, and he’s been known to sleepwalk through a movie. But he’s still a movie star: his sleepwalking tends to be much more interesting than most actors doing their full-out acting.
Plus: a science-fiction story with time travel! Who wouldn’t love this?
In the future, time travel has been invented and then made illegal, which means only the Mob is using it. (Of…course.) They send people they want dead back 30 years in time to 2044, where Loopers kill the marks and then dispose of a body in a time period where no one would be looking for the body. Eventually one of the marks sent back will be the 30-years-older version of the Looper, at which point you collect a big payday and realize you now have 30 years to live.
Caveat #1: do not think about this premise too hard. You do have to allow them the premise, though, because that’s the whole foundation of the movie.
Caveat #2: there’s another element to this movie that I think waters down the premise a little. However, since the movie depends on both caveats being true, it’s not like they could change this.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Joe, a young guy who kills marks and then gets high all day. The dystopia of 2044 is pretty bleak, and you can imagine that you might spend all your time getting high if that’s where you had to live. His future self, Bruce Willis, gets sent back in time, and Joe doesn’t kill him. Chaos ensues.
Gordon-Levitt does an amazing interpretation of a young Bruce Willis. He’s not doing a full-on Bruce Willis imitation; there’s just a few things sprinkled here and there. I completely believed Gordon-Levitt would grow up to be Willis. He’s good. The other actors in the movie–like Emily Blunt, Jeff Daniels, Paul Dano–are also good, even in small roles. There’s one newcomer, Pierce Gagnon, who I thought was scary-remarkable.
It’s a good thing they got such good actors, because the characters are actually the weakest part of the movie. Every character has a good actor and some tics. Believe me: if a character has one tic, you are going to see it fourteen more times. I would have preferred a little more depth to any of the goings-on.
And be warned: This movie is ridiculously violent. I guess that goes along with the setup. Wow, did I close my eyes several times.
On the way home, Darin and I discussed the plot some and why we weren’t more thrilled about the movie (which is very good, but not the 10 we’d both been expecting). And I think it is because of the time travel elements that you shouldn’t think about too hard. Because the second you do think about them, the punch of the ending (I sure hadn’t known what to expect) fades away.
On the other hand, right now it’s a few days after we saw it and I can still tell you the whole story. I bet I’d miss few if any plot points. Which is a sign of a really tight story, and boy howdy, do we not see enough of those these days.