Pulpy Science Fiction

Looper

***½ out of ****

Directed by: Rian Johnson

Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis, Emily Blunt, Paul Dano and Jeff Daniels

Running time: 118 minutes

At one moment early in Looper, a character refers to our hero, Joe Simmons (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), as one with “20th century affectations.” Joe dresses like a detective out of a Dashiell Hammett novel and sleeks down the road in a vintage car – quite striking for 2044, the year the film is set in.

But that phrase could have been summing up the sensibilities of writer/director Rian Johnson, whose first two films were Brick, a modern-day high school film where the characters speak like those from hardboiled detective novels, and The Brothers Bloom, a little-seen but enormously clever caper flick with the zip of a Preston Sturges screwball comedy.

Johnson is a director making very original, modern works out of antiquated genres. It is refreshing to see a creative mind so thoroughly invested in constructing a new treat from preserved elements and seeing how the results stitch together. His latest film retreats into the future yet still feels undeniably classic, as if it could have taken place a century earlier.

However, for the time being, it takes place in 2044. Thirty years from then, time travel exists but is outlawed. A future criminal enterprise still uses time machines to dispose of bodies, however, by zapping those people they want to eliminate back to the past, where paid assassins are ready to kill them. Those assassins are called loopers and each one lives in prestige while tent cities sprout up in the streets around them.

One of these loopers is the aforementioned old-fashioned Joe. Equipped with a short-range weapon (nicknamed a “blunderbuss”) in an empty Kansas cornfield on a solemn afternoon, Joe gets a surprise when he comes face-to-face with himself. The target that has been sent back in time to be disposed of is Joe from 30 years into the future.

Old Joe is played by Bruce Willis. A crafty makeup team applied much cosmetic to Gordon-Levitt, puffing up his cheeks and horseshoe eyebrows while sinking his eyes to resemble the action star's.

Old Joe is out on his own revenge plot while Young Joe pursues him, to avoid sacrificing one of the basic rules of the job – never let your target escape. Johnson wisely spends the first 15 minutes setting up the logistics of his futuristic universe and then lets the characters drive the rest of his story, so that the audience is more concerned with understanding their deeper motivations than on trying to piece apart the time travel paradoxes.

Young Joe, like your archetypal sleuth figure, is drug-addled, miserable and having serious caveats about the dangers of his job. A vagrant past has left him lonely and scarred. Old Joe – first introduced in a thrilling if all too brief flash-forward montage – knows that the future is still grim for his younger counterpart.

A diner-set confrontation between the Joes halfway through the film lets both actors dictate the terms. Gordon-Levitt is compelling as the troubled killer who is smoothly losing his grip on his self-control.

Meanwhile, Willis is just as strong (along with Moonrise Kingdom, this has been a stellar year for him). By embodying a man who has not been granted the solace that he once yearned for, Willis is mining deep territory with this role, one which he brings surprising amounts of empathy to.

Audiences can still see Willis unleash the “Yippee-Ki-Yay” during an exhilarating climactic action sequence. But this is a film more concerned with how the characters contemplate their own time – hence the frequent watches and clocks found throughout – than with traveling through dimensions of time. Looper is both an absorbing character drama and richly satisfying pulp pleasure.