If you’ve seen the movie Looper, let me just tell you, I’m sorry. I know what you’re going through. And while it never really gets better, that dead part of your soul slowly overtakes the very essence of your being, erasing happiness so thoroughly that after a while you don’t even remember what happy ever felt like in the first place, eventually the emptiness you feel inside turns into something manageable. And so, unable to identify joy anymore, the hollow despair that oozes through your pores, it won’t be as crippling as it was immediately after the end of the film. That film. Looper.
I’m not even exaggerating. If anything, it’s the opposite. What’s the opposite of exaggeration? I don’t know. Playing it down? That’s not a word. There’s got to be a word. Understated? I guess, but that doesn’t sound just right. Whatever, if you haven’t seen it, don’t. In fact, if you haven’t seen it, stop reading this review, because it’s best to just keep this whole subject as far removed from your life as possible.
If I had a time machine, I’d travel back to the past and stop myself from ever renting the movie. Or, even better, I’d go back a few months ago to the casual conversation I was having with someone at work, someone who just saw Looper, and told me it was really good. I’d punch him in the face, return to the present, and hopefully the crisis would have been averted.
Unfortunately, time travel doesn’t exist. But it did in Looper. And it didn’t make any sense. So now I can’t even imagine what time travel would be like, because events in Looper have totally ruined the whole concept for me. It’s all about people who come from the future to kill people, also from the future, but in the past. And they make a big show about not messing with the timeline, or, they pretend to. Whenever one of the characters looks confused because something doesn’t make sense with the story, another character will begin the first four or five words of an explanation before shrugging and going, “Ah, blah blah blah time travel, it’s confusing.”
It’s confusing, but it’s not absolutely impossible to wrap your head around. And if it is impossible, they should have incorporated that into the movie. Instead, you have unnecessarily gruesome scenes of a young guy getting maimed and mutilated so that way his future self gets stopped in his tracks, in the present. They amputate all of his limps so they don’t have to kill him. But then they kill him. Ah, blah blah blah, this movie doesn’t make sense.
The whole movie tries way too hard to be Inception, which it fails at, miserably. They shoot for big ideas, for huge plot twists. It never works. It’s all cheap and lame. Like I said, the entire premise of the movie is based around time travel. Kind of. There’s also telekinesis. Which isn’t supposed to be a big deal, but then why do they bother telling us about it at the very beginning of the movie? To tell us specifically that it’s not a big deal. But guess what? It turns out to be a very big deal. Not really the best use of foreshadowing there. And, again, it’s cheap. Is this a time travel movie or a telekinesis movie? I’ve watched the whole thing and I can safely say that it’s really about neither.
It’s about nothing. It’s about Bruce Willis and it’s about making Joseph Gordon Levitt looking slightly more like Bruce Willis. It’s about depicting the future without really changing anything, just adding a few flying motorcycles. Oh yeah and now drugs now come in eye drop form.
Things just happen in this movie. They happen without any introduction or explanation. Like the telekinesis. Like some guy calling up Bruce Willis in the future and giving him the birthday and hospital number of the main bad guy. In the future. But from the past. Confused? Yeah, it’s a stupid movie. There’s not really much more to say. If you’re ever on a plane somewhere and they have one of those built in monitors on the seat in front of you, I guarantee you that Looper is going to be on there. It’s exactly the type of bullshit movie that always makes it onto airplanes. If it’s a free movie, and it sucks, you just know those asshole airlines are going to coerce you to watch it, just to make your flight a little bit shittier.
Sorry, I’m all worked up now. I don’t like being this negative. But Looper, man, it was so bad. Like didn’t somebody review the script? Or take a look at the finished product, wondering if audiences might not react negatively to such a poorly thought up story?
I also saw Magic Mike this weekend. It was pretty good, you know, for a male stripper movie. Definitely better than Looper.