Review: ‘Looper’, loved it or hated it?

Lewis Kopman: Hated It Looper starts with a BANG! Specifically, our protagonist firing a very large Future Gun into the body of a man who has just been instantaneously sent […]


Lewis Kopman: Hated It

Looper starts with a BANG! Specifically, our protagonist firing a very large Future Gun into the body of a man who has just been instantaneously sent back in time by Future Mobsters.

From the outset, Looper blatantly declares that it will stay away from discussing the paradoxes of time travel and focus instead on the development of its central characters: an older man willing to kill for his past, his younger self fighting for a certain future, and a young boy and his mother caught in between.

However, this is where the film falters. Intriguing characters that suggest complexity are simplified, as the hard questions of the film are decided with bang after bang. Bruce Willis, who plays the older version of our protagonist, regresses from a blindly passionate lover into a standard Die Hard-esque action star role. Emily Blunt, the mother of said troubled child, is unnecessarily sexualized in what is perhaps the most spontaneous, superfluous booty-call I have ever seen in any movie, ever.

Looper is often too dark to serve as joyous, mindless entertainment, but shies away from being complex enough to stir up your imagination. It fails to live up to its own possibilities. What could have been this decade’s Matrix becomes too over-excited in its desire to make everyone happy, and ended up leaving me unsatisfied.

Looper even gives up what could have been a serious redeeming feature: the eye candy of Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s boyish good looks are marred by an attempt to make him look more like Bruce Willis. Bummer.

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Jessica Brennan: Loved It

How far would you go to change the past? That’s the question Looper asks, as assassin Joe (everyone’s favourite geek, Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is hired to kill his future self (Bruce Willis), but accidentally lets him escape.

My first impression went something like: THAT WAS SO AWESOME!! That was my Inner Teenage Boy, the voice who demands action, violence and sex. Looper delivers all three, serving up the perfect blockbuster and satisfying scores of adolescent males in the process.

There’s nothing wrong with aiming for a mindless crowd pleaser—just ask James Cameron—but Looper has the right level of ambition. I’ve watched enough Doctor Who to know that time travel is not straightforward, especially for lowly arts students such as myself. Audiences loved The Matrix, but its sequels suffocated them with minor details and lost sight of the bigger picture. Looper doesn’t dumb things down, it just only tells us what we need to know.

The characters channel film noir archetypes: drug addicts, hitmen, child murderers, psychotic kids and a woman who—brace yourself—starts having sex with a man she doesn’t love! These people aren’t pillars of their community, but their flaws make the journey more interesting. Admittedly, the big questions are punctuated by excessive violence, but in a setting where murder is as common as gilets on Market Street, it makes more sense for characters to shoot each other than to discuss their issues over a nice cuppa.