The protagonist of Rian Johnson’s time travel thriller Looper is Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a handsome, wiseass hitman retained by an underworld organization based in Shanghai in 2074. The twist is that Joe resides in Kansas City in 2044, and the victims he eliminates for his employers are from the future. The syndicate’s mastermind, known as the Rainmaker, has settled on the American Heartland three decades past as the perfect locale to disappear rivals, turncoats, and liabilities. Using outlawed time travel technology, the mob deposits its enemies thirty years in the past and a hemisphere away, where a shotgun-toting assassin known as a looper dutifully awaits. This is Joe’s vocation: no-fuss-no-muss disposal in the garbage bin of history.
Joe thinks himself better than the grasping, licentious fools that populate his profession, but the endpoint of his career will be the same. Sooner or later, the victim teleported before each looper is their future-self. The Rainmaker’s local underboss, Abe (Jeff Daniels), makes a ghastly example of fellow looper Seth (Paul Deno) when he permits his 50-something self to escape. The stakes are therefore unambiguous when Joe finds that his latest victim is his grumpier, older self (Bruce Willis). Unfortunately, Old Joe manages to slip from his greener version's grasp, setting off a manhunt that eventually embroils Sara (Emily Blunt), a hard-nosed farmer with an oddly unruly young son.
Looper is writer-director Johnson’s (Brick, The Brothers Bloom) first foray into feature science fiction, and he navigates the genre with enthusiasm and agility, sketching his futurist vision with an apposite level of detail to maintain both believability and momentum. The film is dense but economical from a world-building standpoint. Rather than relying on stony exposition, Johnson mindfully uses every aspect of his medium to convey the particulars of character, story, and setting. The script, to be sure, is not faultless. It betrays aimlessness with respect to its sympathies, as well as an unfortunate taste for sporadic forays into leaden, 1980s-tinged action mayhem. Nonetheless, it’s easy to admire the elegantly executed ambition of Looper’s storytelling, as well as the palpable pleasure it takes in walloping the viewer with galvanic visuals and startling plot turns.
Consistent with superior science fiction films of recent years—Duncan Jones’ Moon and Source Code are exemplars—Looper is both agreeably self-contained and intellectually expansive. Its thematic concerns encompass more territory than its time travel gimmick might suggest, but its explorations are smoothly unassuming, permitting the film to function foremost as a stylized thriller. Consistent with that end, Looper is studded with aesthetically arresting moments. (For all of the film’s dystopian grit, one of its best shots begins with a dusky close-up of Blunt fingering the hem of her dress.) Johnson sometimes strains to utilize the anamorphic widescreen to its full effect, but his adroit exploitation of over-abused cinematic elements—extended pans, overhead shots, and even the dreaded slow-motion—add to Looper’s aura of bracing vitality.
