Been a while since I've done one of these, but then again it's been a while since I saw a film that left me with anything pressing to say.
Looper is painful to recall having viewed. Not because it was bad but because, like Battleship, I can see the much more awesome movie it could have been. Someone had the script for a Philip K. Dick pastiche, and it was incredible: clever, gritty, visceral, and mindbending. The perfect summer sci-fi flick. Then, halfway through filming, the budget ran out. So they shifted gears to a half-assed Terminator ripoff and cut every corner they possibly could. The brillliant futurist cityscapes are replaced with more realistic sets, the cast is pared down to the bare minimum (including reducing Bruce Willis to a supporting player), action scenes are cut out or toned down, and the plot slows to a crawl as they desperately try to make do.
There are bright spots. That first half is still great, Joseph Gordon-Levitt does a bang-up job impersonating Willis. The movie handles the usual time-travel mindfuckery better than most; There's a remarkably plausible explanation of how altering your own past screws with your memory, and the ending, though predictable, is something I've always wanted to see in a time-travel story. And it's a rare movie indeed where a ten-year-old boy steal the show from Bruce Willis. But the whole does not add up to the sum of its' parts.
It's a pity, because between the trailers and the buzz I've been hearing, I was psyched to see this. But it all fell apart.
The cast is great, especially JGL who has been having a stellar career so far, but the plot it what really kept me interested as it continued to throw twist-after-twist at me, without any confusion whatsoever. It’s a great sci-fi flick that actually makes sense. Good review S.J.
ReplyDelete