Best Idea For A Movie 2012 goes to... Looper! A sci-fi with brains, it might not have the action sequences or visual wizardry of, say, Inception but Looper is fine entertainment and one to get the time-travel theory nuts debating on its complexities.
'Time travel hasn't been invented yet but in thirty years it will be.' In the future it has become near-impossible to dispose of bodies so gang victims are illegally transported back to 2044 where waiting Loopers dispatch them before they have a chance to protest their innocence. Joe (Gordon-Levitt) is one such Looper, a drug-addicted lost soul working for Jeff Daniels' gangster; when confronted with his future self, Bruce Willis, Gordon-Levitt hesitates for a moment, which is all Willis needs. Willis makes a run for it with plans to search for and kill the little boy who will grow up to be the madman who rules the city and who set this course of events in motion.
What an idea that is, right? Terminator meets Back To The Future Part II meets 12 Monkeys meets... something else that I can't think of right now. Where some sci-fi would sit and fold its arms and say, What do you think of that?, Looper isn't content with coasting on its great idea; it keeps changing, adding to the already odd story with bits and pieces that enrich rather than smother. Rian Johnson (Brick, The Brothers Bloom) is more interested in character than gimmick, which is a first.
It's also got one of the most inventive deaths around: one looper's older self finds himself losing a finger, then another, then his nose, then a foot, then a leg in quick succession because his younger self is being amputated one limb at a time. It doesn't steep itself in cool, either. There are no 'cool' weapons - the Looper's weapon of choice, the Blunderbuss, is actually pretty useless from more than fifteen feet away - and Loopers themselves are more technicians than trained killers. Don't expect Gordon-Levitt to be a weapons or martial arts expert. This is a sci-fi actioner turned down a notch or two.
But Looper doesn't have it all its own way. It tends to get bogged down in complex (and sometimes dull) exposition. A secluded farm sequence, where Gordon-Levitt recovers from his wounds with the help of Blunt and her boy (Pierce Gagnon), is a long one without activity; a sit-and-wait for a near-mute Willis to show up, Looper's stop-start pacing problems come to fruition here. Gordon-Levitt's make up, his face changed somewhat to resemble Willis a little more, is distracting and doesn't do what it's supposed to do: he still doesn't look anything like Bruce Willis. The climax errs a little on the side of anti too.
But quibble me not, when something fresh comes along, let's all celebrate.