Looper

Sometimes after I see a movie I reimagine the trailer in my head, and I always use the voiceover guy that doesn't get any play nowadays. For Looper, the voiceover would have sounded like this:

Did you like Total Recall?
Did you like Carrie?
Did you like any of the Die Hard movies?
What about Devil's Advocate?
And what if we added a dash of Minority Report?

Well then, you're going to love Looper!

Coming soon to a theatre near you!

End voiceover.

If you're wanting to see Joseph Gordon-Levitt hand in a masterful performance, that's just what you'll get. If you want to see Bruce Willis shooting shit up, fork over your ten bucks.

But if you're in line for a smart time travel movie? You could do better. It is a little telling when instead of explaining the nuances of the time traveling, a character just gets mad and hits the table, "I don't want to talk about it!" And really, once you hit that point, the movie goes downhill from there.

Up until that point I was engaged and interested, but after that I was thinking about Gordon-Levitt getting over his withdraw symptoms in half-an-hour more than whatever the director, Rian Johnson, wanted me to be thinking about.

I guess they didn't have much of a budget. Google "budget" and "Looper" and you get hits about Rian keeping it to a minimum. Which is fine, except the audience shouldn't think "I guess they didn't have much of a budget" and then Google it, because it shows. I love future distopias, but when 70% of the movie is shot in a cornfield, it's hard for me to tell that it's a future distopia. And the speeder-bike scenes were sadly laughable, the audience should be thinking, "I hope he gets away!" not "They were doing this better in 1983."

I can't discern that with Gordon-Levitt and Paul Dano in the cast, whether this was two Sundancers in a mainstream, or was this Bruce Willis in a Sundance?

One saving grace is a terrific performance by Jeff Daniels, short as it may be.

Weapon Mods gives Looper an Off the mark.