newjerseynewsroom.com

BY JOE TYRRELL

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

MOVIE REVIEW

In the new crime-time travel movie “Looper,” Joseph Gordon-Levitt discovers that he grows up to be Bruce Willis.

Naturally, he tries to kill himself.

Writer-director Rian Johnson throws a few clever ideas, mostly borrowed, plus a lot of black-clad henchmen and stylized guns into the Wayback Machine, then sets it for purée. Stand back, there’s lots of splatter.

Gordon-Levitt’s Joe is one of those henchmen, well-paid enough that he can probably cover his own insurance costs. Joe’s job consists of driving his pick-up out to a cane field on the edge of a city, checking his antique watch and then staring at a white plastic mat spread out on the ground.

With some regularly, bound men with hoods over their faces materialize on the mat. Joe raises a super-modern blunderbuss, pulls the trigger - splat, splat, splat. He burns the bodies, collecting the silver or gold bars conveniently attached as payment. Then he goes to an off-the-beaten-track diner and stares into cups of swirling coffee, all Jean-Luc Goddard like.

It is 2044, and as Joe says in voiceover, time travel hasn’t been invented yet. But 30 years further along, it has been, and immediately outlawed.

What happens when time travel is outlawed? Only outlaws will have time. Futuristic crime syndicates send their 2074 problems back to the past to be erased permanently.

As it happens, 2044 looks remarkably like 2012 Detroit - wild and depressing in the streets. Cars haven’t appreciably improved as seen with Joe’s pick-up, although there is the occasional air motorcycle, so that’s one thing.

The economy has remained on track, since there are a lot of shopping cart people and druggies wandering the streets. The drug of choice is ingested via eye drops, not all that convenient if you ask me.

Needless to say, there are also dives. Joe’s crime boss is headquartered above La Belle Aurore, which Rian Johnson wants you to know is the name of the club where Rick and Elsa had their Paris rendezvous in the backstory of “Casablanca.” Noted. 

That one probably wasn’t a strip joint, like the 2044 place where teeny Piper Perabo as stripper Suzie could be a love interest for Joe, except she’s not really that interested. It’s also where Joe gets tidbits from fellow “looper” and fellow party boy Seth (Paul Dano).

Seth is one of those who have been blessed with a minor mutation, telekinetic power. Like so much else in the human genome, though, it turns out to be mainly hype. The power turns out to be no stronger than a parlor trick.

But Seth is also trying to alert Joe to some changes on the business end of things. There are unsettling rumors about the latest 2074 crime boss, but Joe’s not that interested. Seth is ostensibly his best friend, but Joe’s not much into close relationships.

Just as well, because being a looper isn’t a job with a future. Just to wrap up loose ends, the hapless hooded victims that loopers occasionally wait around to dispatch turn out to be their future selves. The 2044 version pulls the trigger, gets a nice bonus, then sees the world, starts a family, raises emus – that is until 2074 rolls around.

Those are the unfortunate circumstances under which Joe meets Old Joe. It’s distressing to Gordon-Levitt, but at least it explains why he’s wearing prosthetic makeup to resemble, sort of, Bruce Willis. Or at least, Bruce Willis as played by Keanu Reeves channeling Mickey Rooney as the “Japanese” neighbor in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”

Did young Bruce Willis look vaguely Asian? Or is it just that we might misremember him as cooler if Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays him that way?