[xrr rating=4.5/5]
Would you like to read a loopy review, from a loopy reviewer, about the loopy movie called “Looper”?
Do you ever think back to your childhood and remember what you used to watch on TV? I do. I can clearly remember sitting in front of the tube with my sisters and brothers and watching Sesame Street. I remember Big Bird walking down the street and strutting on into the corner store and saying “Good morning Mr. Looper!” and then the owner screaming “It’s Hooper! IT’S HOOPER!” Do any of you remember this? Well anyways, it has NOTHING to do with this review of the movie “Looper.” I just needed a paragraph to segway into this movie review.
“Looper” is a science fiction, time travelling thrill ride, specifically made for people like me. You see, I LOVE science fiction, and the type of sci-fi I love most is time travel themed. Give me a wormhole, a quantum leap, a grandfather paradox, or a parrallel universe and I’m hooked… Hell, just give me a Delorean and 1.21 jigawatts and I’ll do the rest.
“Looper” takes place in the year 2044 (and 2074). In the future (2074) time travel has been invented, but is illegal because of how dangerous it can be. The only people that use it are the baddest of the bad, big-time mobsters.
The baddest mobster in the future is called the Rainmaker. The Rainmaker always needs his enemies wiped off the face of the earth, but getting rid of a body in the future is almost impossible with all the futuristic tracking implants in people. The best way to get rid of a body is to zap it back thirty years and have “loopers” do the dirty work.
Let’s go back to 2044 now. Back here the Rainmaker has sent one man to run the show. His name is Abe (Jeff Daniels). Abe is the big wig here. He hires young people called “loopers” to go to a certain place where a person is to be zapped back from the future, and blow them away with a blunderbuss shotgun. Pretty simple.
Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a looper. Loopers get paid handsomely. They get paid every time they kill someone from the future. The best part is that their pay (which are silver bars) is taped to the back of their kills. All they do is kill their target, (who is bound, gagged and their head covered with a bag) burn the body, and collect their loot. It’s almost too easy.
Or is it. Sometimes you kill your target and there are gold bars taped to their back. This means you’ve just closed your loop… which also means you’ve just killed yourself. That’s when the party really starts. Now, you know FOR CERTAIN, that you only have thirty years left to live. Some loopers like this. They go out and party hard and then they go live their lifes to the fullest.
Well Joe has to go assassinate one of his targets. For some reason, on this kill he hesitates, and low and behold, it’s his future self! (He was supposed to close his loop!) Old Joe (Bruce Willis) manages to get away from his young self and tries to fix things.
Now we’re off to the races. Young Joe wants to close his loop for two reasons, one, Abe’s going to rip his head off if he doesn’t, and two, Old Joe has already lived his life! Its time for Young Joe to reap the rewards of being a looper.
Old Joe has a wonderful wife in the future and doesn’t want anything to happen to her, so he sets out to kill the Rainmaker while he’s still a child. (Yeah, it’s wack, but it’s completely awesome.)
I could keep going on and tell you how it all ends, but I really think you’d like this movie, so I’m going to stop the plot right here.
Now let’s “Matty up” this review.
Time travel movies are fantastic. There are so many that I have loved. “12 Monkeys,” “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” “Terminator,” “Freejack” and of course “Back to the Future” are some of my favorite films of all time. There are some bad ones too. “Timecop,” “The Time Machine,” “The Butterfly Effect” and “Freejack” are all somewhat terrible, yet I can’t stop watching them. Maybe it’s because I have always been interested in science, and the possibilities of this actually happening excites me. Or maybe it’s just because I’d love to see different places in time… or maybe (much like Southwest Airlines) I just “want to get away.” All I know is that these types of movies keep me riveted.
I know there are rules to time travel. In “Back to the Future” you couldn’t run into your past self or the space-time continium may SKEW off and form a terrible alternate universe where Biff Tannen is married to Lorraine Baines-McFly, Doc Emmitt Brown is committed, and GEORGE MCFLY IS DEAD! In “Terminator,” only living tissue could travel through time and “Cyborgs don’t feel pain, I do. Don’t do that again.” In “Bill and Ted” all you had to do was “Be excellent to each other.” And in “Freejack,” you couldn’t… no wait, you could… hold on… actually, I have NO idea what was going on in “Freejack.” But it was AWESOME and TERRIBLE! And I found it to be terribly awesome!
Now in “Looper” there were rules, but they were vague. Here you could have dinner with your future self, you could touch each other without spontaneously combusting, and you pretty much do whatever you wanted. All we (we, as in, you reading this) needed to do was suspend reality and logic for a little bit. Once you start trying to figure out how the time travelling thing is working, you’ll start tripping over yourself… so don’t think too much about it.
What you need to do is, finish reading this review, enjoy a nice “Fun Matty Fact” and then go see this film. Have I steered you wrong yet? Didn’t I tell you “The Artist” was a great film? And who told you that “John Carter” sucked out loud? That’s right, I did, good old Uncle Matty… and I won’t steer you wrong now.
I read a review in Entertainment Weekly on this film and they gave this movie a B+. I’m slightly better than Entertainment Weekly, so I’m going to give this a slightly better score than them. I give this dazzling film an A-. I won’t guarantee you any Oscars, but I guarantee you it’s better than “The Master.”
I just hope someday while I’m still alive time-travel is invented. I would travel back in time and beat everyone up that ever called me Big Bird.
Fun Fact: This is the third time in a film that Bruce Willis has travelled back in time and encountered his younger self. The two other films are “12 Monkeys” and “The Kid.”
Fun Matty Fact: The reason I am (and always have been) called Big Bird is because I have a gigantic nose (and beautiful, flowing yellow/blond hair). Some may call it a beak. To be truthful, I actually do like the nickname. I like all my nicknames, and I have a lot of them. I would never really travel back in time and beat anyone up… I’d probably just steal their wallet. (Like the guy in “Back to the Future 2” did!)