News location:

Canberra Today 13°/16° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Review: ‘Looper’ (MA) *** and a half

TIME travel offers filmmakers a thematic field well-enough ploughed yet able to be fresh because its impossibility leaves the field open to any kind of invention.

Writer/director Rian Johnson’s complex screenplay is indeed fresh, its dramatic structure restrained rather than inflated by the cop-out option of monsters from outer space.

In 2044, Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) has a lucrative and easy job awaiting sudden appearances in a Kansas cornfield of bound and hooded men whom he immediately shoots with a blunderbuss, rolls on to their stomachs and removes bars of silver bullion as payment for terminating somebody the criminal fraternity has sent back from 30 years hence.

One day the arrival from the future is packaged differently. The subject (Bruce Willis) is Joe himself. This turns the drama around a new corner. And it is good.

The cornfield belongs to widow Sara, possessed of telekinetic powers (and why not in an age when time travel is possible?) and her son Cid. Johnson is setting us up to unravel more tangles on the way to a bloody denouement that rejects convention. For the first time in his life, Joe must confront genuine moral choices.

Admirably designed and staged, “Looper” is futurist fantasy credible beyond normal expectations. As Sara, Emily Blunt, always marvellous, wields an axe more correctly than do most male actors. And Pierce Gagnon as Cid is a child actor with a possible future if he can survive the hazards of growing into it.

At Dendy, Hoyts and Limelight

Who can be trusted?

In a world of spin and confusion, there’s never been a more important time to support independent journalism in Canberra.

If you trust our work online and want to enforce the power of independent voices, I invite you to make a small contribution.

Every dollar of support is invested back into our journalism to help keep citynews.com.au strong and free.

Become a supporter

Thank you,

Ian Meikle, editor

Dougal Macdonald

Dougal Macdonald

Share this

Leave a Reply

Related Posts

Follow us on Instagram @canberracitynews