The pReview Re-viewing of..
Looper
CLICK THE TITLE TO VIEW THE TRAILER IN A SEPARATE WINDOW
(it is highly recommended to view the trailer and THEN read!)
(warning: If, in the future, you are confronted with killing yourself from the even more future.. Just do it.)
by Jeff Finck
written: 8/7/2012
Release Date: September 28, 2012
The premise: Imagine, if you will, that you are an organized gangster. Picture the world of tomorrow: Life is good. You and your other organized gangster buddies are running around Shanghai, living it up.. Drinking all that drank, smoking all that smank, and banging all that pank. Now, picture yourself in the position that one of your organized criminal friends is being a real downer and you just need to off the guy.. Because in the future, people who make you depressed are dicks and should totally just be killed. The question comes: What do you do when things escalate to that level of interaction AND you need to dump the body AND never have it traced back to you because this is the future and it is really, REALLY hard to do accomplish your goal? If your answer was anything other than: "Build a time machine, strap the offender into it, send him back to Kansas City 30 years prior, then let Joseph Gordon-Levitt introduce him to a giant explodey stick full of bullets and death." ..Anything other than that.. Then you should watch this movie.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis both play Joe. Mighty Joe Young (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is an upstanding citizen (slash) retro-hitman for the Mob of the World of Tomorrow.. Mighty Joe Willis (Bruce Willis) is a loose end from the future and the mob sends him back in time to get got by his younger self. And right now, they're staring at each other in a small diner in the middle of balls-nowhere, trying to figure out what to do next. While they exchange pleasantries over coffee, Younger Joe wraps some barbed wire around his tongue and spits an insult into Bruce Willis' backwards face and how it looks backwards! Slam! Hahaha.. Uhmm..
The intricacies of time travel are very delicate and quite unknowing. So, whenever an attempt to explain such a concept in movies occurs, it has a tendency to sound.. Well.. Dumb. Looper's move (An incredibly classy one, in my opinion) is to skim over it with the following dialogue:
younger Joe: "Do you know what's gonna happen? Ya done all this, already? As me?"
elder Joe: "I don't wanna talk about time travel."
BOOM! Solved. Moving on. Now it's time for Younger Joe to send his older self on a Viking funeral boat laced with thrown lead and an existential crisis. But older Joe (henceforth referred to as O.J.) apparently does know what's going to happen, so he dares younger Joe (henceforth known as Y.J.) to “gat” him. Anticipating every outcome, he decides to go with a move that guarantees his younger self no future children and kicks Y.J. directly in his man gun.. And actual gun. In the excitement, O.J. daringly leaps through a nearby window.. And, as this is something Bruce Willis is familiar with, he does it flawlessly, thus securing his escape! Speaking of which, when escaping through a window, sometimes Bruce Willis is clever:
Other times.. This time, in fact, Bruce don't give no kinda fucks:
I have some good news and some good news: The good news is that in the future, time travel will be invented. The other good news is that in the future, only the largest criminal organizations will be the ones using it with any kind of frequency. Did I start this paragraph off by letting you know that the good newses were really only aimed at criminals? I didn't? Oh.. Well, if you're a major player in an organized crime syndicate, guess what!!? Wait.. I already told you. Uhmm.. I wonder if this movie is based off of my invented, very fake, completely made up, 100% fictional account of the book I totally didn’t write that was based on another, different fictional story that H.G. Wells actually, completely, totally, 100% did write and that I made a picture of that makes it look like he totally wrote my other completely fabricated book? (Probably not.)
Well, as stated, in the future, time travel will be rampantly used and abused by crime syndicates all over the world. These organizations send people they want gone, back in time to specific locations so that their specialized assassins (called Loopers), can.. You know, end the loop. Time after time, kill after kill, these Loopers make a damn good profit of gold bars and eye drops, and jelly beans, and roofies, and 1930s style clothing, and fun stick guns.. Also, I assume that in the future, these guys will have exclusive rights for their very own breakfast of champions:
The only real rule is that you should never let your quarry escape. It seems like a pretty important rule, seeing as everyone who comes back has a hood on their face, they're weighed down by about 200 pounds of gold bricks, and they have chains all over their arms and genitals. On top of it being a significant rule, it is a VERY difficult one to completely screw up. Y.J. (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, remember.. JoJo, if you will.. But with less singing about boys..) gets the startle of his young life when, lo and behold, his older self comes through the portal! The addendum to the first (and only rule) is that you never let anyone escape, even if it's YOU! The minor hesitation is just enough.. Wait.. Are we going to address the fact that when O.J. (Bruce Willis, remember.. Joe Bruce, if you will.. But with less rapping about magnets..) gets sent back, he is completely unfettered. Well, except for the gold bricks, which he uses to escape because he is deadly accurate after spending 30 years learning to hone his gold brick throwing skills, probably because he remembers everything that is going to happen in the next.. I’ve gone cross-eyed.. Well, O.J. tags Y.J. with a brick and a fist, and goes on the lam.
Lamenting his situation, Y.J. realizes that his boss (Assumingly played by Mr. Rainmaker himself, Jeff Daniels) is about to go ballistic and come after him until O.J. is finally dead. It turns out to be a pretty decent assessment: Jeff Daniels rallies the troops and wants both Joes laying in front of him wearing straitjackets and gold bricks, so he can hold them for 30 years and send them back 30 more years into the past so that new younger-Joe can kill old younger-Joe and old older-Joe, like a giant, never ending loop.. Oh.. I get it! “Looper.” Well, as the trailer winds down, O.J. tries to convince Y.J. that he's planning on saving his.. Er.. Their life.. Uhmm.. Lives. Or something. But then Emily Blunt shows up and.. What was I saying?
The rest of the trailer can really only be described using 114 regular words and 4 hyphenated ones: This trailer has more guns and shooting than a hillbilly celebration, helicopter chases, more than one finger gun, slip 'n sliding through mind banging dub-step, gang-stars living the good life, non-cheesy usage of slow motion, Chinese neck tattoos.. I'm pretty sure that the white rabbit shows up with his pocket watch.. Bruce Willis using those guns from Call of Duty that piss you off when you get killed by them.. Explosions, telekinesis (TKs, as they're referred to in the movie), sexy dancing, unsexy dancing, penguin tetherball championships, field explosions (You know.. Because fuck fields, they're boring.), Emily Blunt using the aforementioned telekinesis.. And finally, gravity cranks it up to 11 and hugs the dick out of Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
Well, I can't tell you enough about how stoked I am about this flick. First of all, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and director Rian Johnson team back up for the first time since Brick! By the way, if you haven't seen Brick, just go buy it and then watch it 6 times in a row. (Do ittttttt.) Then you have Bruce Willis walking around, completely owning everyone's testicles.. And that is always an asset for any movie. Now time travel gets a little "Meh" in movies, but I like that this seems more like a back plot to the whole moral issue of feverishly needing to kill yourself. If that isn't food for an existential debate, then I don't know what existentialism is. Actually.. I don't know what existentialism is, and I don't know how that makes me feel. We've been a bit overloaded with CG special effects and Sci-Fi schlock lately, but this seems pretty grounded. This is almost based in reality, with just a little extra: A moral-bending concept involving violence, anger, retribution, self-discovery and Emily Blunt. Can't wait!