This weekend, I watched what I now consider the best time travel movie I have ever seen, Rian Johnson’s critically acclaimed Looper. Starring Joseph Gordon Levitt, Bruce Willis, Emily Blunt, and several other notable actors, Looper is the tale of Joe, a special kind of temporal hitman for the mob. When Joe in 2044 finds himself face to face with his future self, he faces an impossible choice: kill his future self, or let him get away and face torture and death in the here and now. That’s just the set-up. What follows is a brilliant tale of humanity, revenge, and hope. The time travel mechanics are minimal and clever. No one ever tries to explain how time travel was achieved 30 years in Joe’s future. It’s just accepted that it exists.
So, let’s dive in and discuss this masterclass in storytelling. Spoilers abound.
First, the story. Looper is both a different type of time travel story and a very familiar one. A traveler from the future jumps into the past with the hope of making changes. In this case, it’s Bruce Willis’ older Joe who comes back in time to prevent his wife’s murder. Younger Joe, played beautifully by Joseph Gordon Levitt, must stop his future self before the mob’s enforcers catch them both. The game of cat-and-mouse that follows is fun and imaginative. Joe’s story, and its ultimate ending, are the heart of this movie. When young Joe meets Sara and Cid, his life changes forever. This is not so much a story about how a good woman can turn around a dangerous man. It’s about accepting something bigger than yourself.
Joe is small. Young Joe just wants to drop drugs and get laid between assignments. Old Joe just wants to stop the rise of the mob boss whose goons kill his wife. Neither is a part of of anything particularly bigger than their own selfish desires. But when younger Joe meets Sara and Cid, he sees a world outside of his own little loop. He sees that love, compassion, and most importantly, hope are the keys to winning the day and setting things right. Cid, in particular, opens young Joe’s heart and mind to do what needs to be done to stop old Joe from getting his revenge.
The story is good. It’s solid in all the right ways. There are not many time travel rules with which you need to keep up. The ending is perfect. But what makes all that work is the performances of the actors and the writing of the characters, especially young Joe and old Joe. The chemistry between Joseph Gordon Levitt and Bruce Willis is compelling and electrifying. Looper reminds us of why Bruce Willis is one of the greatest action stars of all time. This really isn’t an action movie, but it has terrific action sequences, nail-biting tension, and waves of heart-break. Gordon Levitt and Willis nail it.
Young Joe is a cynical Looper who kills the mob’s enemies from the future. All he wants is to do his job, make his money, and retire to France. He does not really engage with the morality of what he does. He does not care who he kills or why. He is a drug addict who frequently cavorts with a prostitute (the always delightful Piper Perabo). He is about as unlikely and unlikable a protagonist as we could start with, but he is charming and grounded.His growth from where we meet him to the end of the film is subtle, believable, and a painful slow burn. Joseph Gordon Levitt has always been a terrific actor, but this seems to be the role he was born to play.
Old Joe just wanted to be happy. He had his Loop closed when he was a young man, meaning in at least one timeline, young Joe killed Old Joe and then lived out his life over the next 30 years. Young Joe heard rumors of a new mob boss in the future calling himself the Rainmaker who was closing all the Loops of all the Looper assassins. After meeting a woman in China, falling in love, and getting married, old Joe thinks he’s found a measure of peace with his new wife. Until the Rainmaker comes for him, and the mob enforcers accidentally kill his wife while trying to take him. Joe ultimately escapes the mobsters, travels back to the past, escapes from young Joe, and begins searching for the Rainmaker in 2044 before he can kill Joe’s wife in 2079.
What follows is a tense game of cat-and-mouse as young Joe tracks old Joe and tries to stop the older version of himself from making changes to the timeline. This leads young Joe to Sara’s farm where she is raising her son Cid alone. Meanwhile, old Joe is assassinating children who were born on the same day and in the same hospital as Cid. Of course, this brings young Joe into a more personal and direct conflict with old Joe than he started with. Because young Joe has come to care for Sara and Cid, he cannot stand idly by while old Joe enacts his plan to kill a third 5-year-old boy. Had he known the whereabouts of the other two children, I have no doubt young Joe would have tried to protect them, too.
Yes, Cid turns out to be the Rainmaker. He has powerful telekinetic abilities that allow him to move objects or tear a person apart. Even knowing that, young Joe risks his life to save Sara and Cid from old Joe. What follows is one of the best uses of time travel I have ever seen, specifically the trope of something in the past rippling forward into the future. We saw it happening in a few scenes throughout the movie as Loopers from the past send messages to their future selves. This ending, though, caught me completely off guard but felt so perfectly right for the characters and story.
There is one scene I haven’t talked about yet. The diner sequence where young Joe meets up with old Joe face-to-face for the first time. The scene ratchets up the tension of an already tense situation. Old Joe lays out what happened to him and his wife in the future. Young Joe offers to walk away if old Joe will just show him a picture of his dead wife. Old Joe knows that if he changes the past too much, he will never meet his wife. Dread and heartbreak permeate this scene, and it is a masterclass in writing by Rian Johnson and acting by Joseph Gordon Levitt and Bruce Willis.
This was not Bruce Willis’ last major release before his dementia diagnosis, but it feels like it could have been the cap on the great man’s career. Sin City 2, RED 2, GI Joe 2, and the sequels to Unbreakable were all in his future when this movie was released in 2012. None of those really catches the essence of Bruce as an action star and a leading dramatic actor quite like Looper. This was an original story with compelling characters and great arc for old Joe. Had this been Bruce Willis’ last major release, it would have been a worthy one.
