TIFF 2012 Review: Rian Johnson's Looper

If you’ve ever found yourself, as I’ve found myself, moaning and recoiling from the ongoing onslaught of remakes, premakes, re-boots, sequels and bad, bad bad films inspired by toys we knew were stupid when we were playing with them in the ‘80s, take notice.

If you don’t see Rian Johnson’s Looper at TIFF or when it hits theatres on the 28^th, you can take your constitutional right to complain about unoriginality, fold it up tight and put it up your butt. Because this is the film you’ve been waiting for.

I didn’t think they made movies like Looper anymore.


It’s a sprawling, deeply smart and terribly stylish genre masterpiece, a seemingly effortless and utterly unique mix of the to-die-for updated noir gangsterism that Johnson debuted in his breakthrough Brick and rusty, dusty philosophically hip sci-fi. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Joe, a “looper” tasked in 2044 with killing and erasing targets sent 30 years back in time from a time-travel-tech possessing gangster known as “the Rainmaker”.

Each target is sent back hooded and with payment–four silver ingots–attached, and because the bodies don’t technically exist they’re easy to dispose of. Looper’s lives are brutal but routine: they kill guys, they exchange silver for cash, they get high and go to the club They’re provided enough money to live stylishly, enough to drive vintage Miatas past the hordes of starving vagrants who are victims of whatever calamity all-but halted future technological progress somewhere around 2012. All is normal, clockwork, until the moment Joe is faced with the abrupt task of killing his future self (Bruce Willis), who arrives unbound, unhooded and very pissed off.

Looper is a crime drama with a sci-fi coat wrapped around it, a seamless blend of the micro-level gangster motivations that bind the Loopers together and the cataclysmic implications of trying to change an already-lived future. It thinks big, enormous even, off-handedly incorporating half a dozen radioactive plot elements that singly would derail a lesser film. As Brick was, it’s rich with unaddressed detail and performances from actors smart enough to grok what’s happening, and Looper’s ludicrous premise from almost the first is made to seem totally reasonable and massively compelling.

If it were written and directed by a less talented director, it would be full of hard-left twists, but as it is it’s a breath-taking indulgence in the suspense that can be squeezed out of absolutely original blood-stained inevitability. It’s a treat. It’s great, and TIFF got it right scheduling it to open the festival tonight, even if it’s not Canadian, and even if it’s not a period drama. If I don’t see a film I like better than Looper in the next 10 days, I’ll still be one happy fella, with an absolutely intact constitutional right to complain about all of the other tough-guy genre films that aren’t half as good as this one is.