Time-Travel Thriller Looper Should Make Its Director a Hollywood Player
Looper, a clever and action-packed heartland version of The Terminator, may not make as much sense as it should, but as the Bruce Willis character says in a diner, “I don’t want to talk about time travel [crap]. If we do, we’ll be here all day, making diagrams with straws.”
Fine. So: Looper isn’t taking itself too seriously, and nor should we. Rian Johnson’s film, set mostly in 2044 Kansas, is loads of fun, making judicious use of special effects (with its rusty hovercycles and ragged slums it looks more like Repo Man than Blade Runner), and it has some cool twists.
Willis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt play the same character at two stages of life. As a man of about 30, Joe is a hired assassin and a junkie who gets high by sprinkling drugs on his eyeballs with a dropper. In 2074, his masters in a massive crime syndicate send him hooded, bound figures that he simply arranges to shoot at a given spot at a given time. Joe owes his job to temporal outsourcing — in 2074, due to tagging techniques, it’s too hard to get rid of dead bodies but Joe is living before that technology exists.
When a friend (Paul Dano) is assigned to kill his own self from 30 years in the future, we learn that these “loopers,” as the hit men are called, are being assigned to “close the loop” by exterminating the future versions of themselves. A mob boss (a quietly scary Jeff Daniels) sent back from the future to monitor these roving assassins convinces Joe that it’s best not to tangle with the crime lords’ idea of how time should play out. Nevertheless, when Willis’s Old Joe, in 2074, manages to alter the circumstances when he is kidnapped and sent back in time for assassination, younger Joe hesitates and allows Old Joe to escape in the cane fields of Kansas.
Sounds interesting. No doubt there will be technibabble difficulties. But it seems to me Old Joe ought to know already that Young Joe lets him go, which is why he should not be sent back to himself in the first place, difficulty #1.
(of course we brush right over time travel being difficulty #0)
(and that apparently time travel back forward must be impossible or extremely more expensive or they wouldn’t need to send a guy back to camp out which can’t really be that attractive)
(and maybe I should stop even worrying about the hypotheticals and go see the movie!)
The script sounds really stupid — if you have time travel, you would use it to dispose of bodies instead of: loot every “disappeared” art work, precious stone, fabulous sets of gold treasure, and silver bounty?
Plus, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is an OK actor, he was fine as a kid on Third Rock, but he lacks the masculine charisma that marks an action hero. He’s getting the inevitable push as Hollywood’s gay/female cabal trot out there laughable idea of a manly action hero: another wispy pretty boy. See Shia LaBoeuf, etc.
There’s a reason Stallone made two Expendables movies. Aging Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Willis, and Chuck Norris have more masculine charisma even into their seventies (for Norris) than Gordon-Levitt and other pretty boy actors will ever possess. I disagree, the director in consenting to this casting is ridiculous, there’s no way the audience will emotionally buy that man-boy Levitt (as an actor, who knows or cares about his personal charisma) will grow up to be Bruce Willis. All American Vulnerable Tough Guy.
Casting Willis requires more than just a younger actor who can ape his mannerisms. You need a guy who can match him for masculine drive and intensity, mixed with vulnerable humor (Willis’s stock in trade). Failure to do that simply kills the movie right from the start. No one will buy that Gordon-Levitt turns into Willis.
The whole point is that young Joe is not that tough, albeit fit and physically strong. All he has to do is pull the trigger and carry a body, physically demanding but no more than visiting a gym regularly. He escapes the mob as much by luck, help from old Joe and incompetence of the gangsters as anything.
After retirement Joe gets into a tough criminal life to fund his drug use after running low on money. Just watch the diner scene, it is obvious that old Joe is meant in the script to be far tougher than young Joe.
Thank you! I am really tired of Hollywood’s idea of what real men are supposed to look like. The men in movies and TV are so effeminate looking these days. Where have all the cowboys gone?
I’ve noticed the change also. I suspect that in today’s Hollywood it’s not just women who have to put up with the “casting couch”.
monycall, you are right on the money. This culture has become the emasculation of the male culture. The image is promoted through the entertainment industry through the filter of Progressivism. Little boys are supposed to act more like little girls, but little girls are not supposed to act like little boys, and the mother driving is the dominant figure as she drives boys to soccer practice in her SUV.
It’s no longer practical, but if you compare the strength of boys who throw hay bales to several hundred head of cattle while growing up to the strength of a boy playing sports and working out in the gym, people would be amazed. On the farm or ranch, the boys aren’t admiring their form in a mirror as they curl a dumbbell; they just do their work until its done or they are exhausted. This is the difference between the coddled boys of suburbia and the boys of the country, but soon it will be illegal for the boys of the country to work on the farms and ranches. The Liberals want to eliminate this training field for men. It doesn’t produce the self-absorbed beauty queens they need for a dystopia.
Let the manure fly. I grew up in the country and work out with young guys in martial arts (Jiu-jitsu) and the young city boys who are 30 and 40 years younger are always asking how come country boys are so much stronger. I tell them it is the difference between working out and working, very few of them understand the subtle message, but then I tell them stacking a thousand bales is like lifting a hundred thousand pounds during your work-out day. LOL They are good kids, they just haven’t had the chance to learn the discipline of work.
I saw a photo 1911 photo of american indians in Tuscon, Arizona and they were all fit and thin from working on the farm. Their present day great grandchildren are overweight and riddled with diabetes.
Old time Irish immigrants referred to their kids generation as “narrowbacks” because they did not develop the muscle that comes from swinging a pick.
Old time coalminers operated heavy equipment in cramped spaces under the ground. That is now automated.
In 1934 the longshoreman Union in SF had a violent strike. These guys were serious badasses with stong backs from unloading cargo all day. Containerized freight has rendered the longshoremen bloated softies.
Automation has also made farm work much easier. Certain construction jobs still require strength and coordination.
While I disagree with Michelle Obama’s politics, I share her concern with a nation riddled with diabedes and kidney failure.
Excellent points, I now live in an area with an Hispanic concentration. I often analyze the Hispanic grocery shopping habits while waiting in the checkout lines. The majority of items are sugar based (fructose corn syrup) processed foods.
It is no wonder there is an epidemic of diabetes in the Hispanic communities. Besides being a tragedy, there will be a tremendous cost to society as these children reach adulthood.
I disagree with Michele’s assumption of power in presuming she can dictate dietary habits for children and the family, but she has identified a problem. A real solution is far more complicated than altering school lunch programs and feeding the high school football player or wrestler the same number of calories as a seventy pound fourteen year-old girl.
As a former college athlete, I ate at a training table with all the steak, potatoes, and various foods we could eat, and I couldn’t gain an ounce. I started college at seventeen years of age.
I hope those coaches are finding ways to feed their athletes.
My best friend, a mexican american died from diabetes at 27. He was not overweight, but had juvinile diabetes. PC types do not want to admit it, but mexicans are more susceptable to diabetes. You are correct, their diets do not help. Open any barrio “refri” and you will see a gallon of Sunny Delight fake orange juice.
Mark Rippetoe of “Starting Strengh” has a good program for young skinny kids to put on muscle.
I guess I’m just thick, but these types of movie plots tend to confuse me, and after they end, I just think, “I don’t get it” – that’s why I didn’t bother watching the last two “Harry Potter” flicks.
Maybe it’s not a coincidence that people here in Japan often told me I look just like Forrest Gump!
Why not send the undesirables back hundreds of millions of years in time — before the earth’s atmosphere had enough oxygen to support life as we know it — and be done with the problem? You avoid having to deal with all those old timer assassins (a problem that people smart enough to run a big futuristic crime syndicate should have been able to anticipate).
Gah. I love time travel flicks, though really, nothing can outdo some of those old Stargate episodes.
“Get used to the name blah blah.”
Why in the name of the Living God would I do that? If you’re still subjecting yourself to hollywood programing you are still sick. Take the cure man!
went to see the movie, the hotchick and even the old yippee yi cai yay Don Bruce Willis, couldn’t save this stinker of a movie. the nuances were just to subtle for me. the rainmaker was the center of the plot and who was he?
Bruce Willis and Time Travel. Does anybody sing Blueberry Hill?
Went to see the movie. There are some interesting references to future economics in it.
1. The camera briefly shows a weather-worn, stylized, stenciled grafitti image on the side of a building of someone who looks like Barack Obama.
2. Only gold and silver are considered real money. Paper is used to facilitate exchange.
3. The US economy has suffered a destruction of its capital and wealth stock. The wise guys and criminals have walking around money but there seems to be a lack of real capital and wealth to develop an economy with. Most of the businesses are the kinds that do not require long term capital investments: things that give you a quick turnaround such as restaurants, bars, strip clubs, drug dealing.
4. Many farms have been abandoned, anything long term. People are scavenging, relying on the gains made by a previous economy.
So if you put this all together, perhaps the filmmaker was describing the future of Obama’s America in economics terms. Its very subtle, most people may have missed it, but the message is there.
The movie preview and poster both link to “Brick”, instead of “Looper”. Was this intentional?