Oklahoma Gazette Film Review: Looper

Unlike many moviegoers, 17-year-old farm girl Nell Sweetzer (Ashley Bell, The Day) has no memory of the events of The Last Exorcism, a found-footage smash of three years prior. The Last Exorcism Part II finds her taking steps to build life anew, beginning in a boarding house for troubled girls, where the deeply devout Nell is exposed to such heretofore corrupting influences as lipstick and rock music and YouTube and cotton candy.

The ABCs of Death

Suspense novelist Jeffery Deaver once praised the short-story format, writing that the minimal time investment on the part of the reader allows the writer to get away with endings he or she cannot in the long form. In other words, the writer can be meaner, more devious. He's absolutely right, and the theory applies wholesale to The ABCs of Death, more or less a horror anthology depicting "26 ways to die."

Lifeforce

Tobe Hooper got a raw deal. The director of horror hits The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Poltergeist didn't deserve to be sent to movie jail for 1985's Lifeforce. It's a well-crafted, well-intentioned work that was mismarketed and misunderstood, losing a bundle of money and soon sending Hooper into the lands of episodic television and direct-to-video features.

It's a real time killer.

October 2nd, 2012

Hurray for movies with ideas. In Looper, writer-director Rian Johnson crams in so many, it initially looks as if this sci-fi actioner might collapse under the weight of them all. Dystopian society, time travel, telekinesis, gangland killings — there are a lot of ground rules to keep track of here, much of them conveyed through the wobbly device of a narrator.

But then something remarkable happens: Looper plays fair with its own mind-bending construct. Balancing muscular action with the intellectual approximation of an M.C. Escher drawing, Johnson delivers on the considerable promise of his previous films, Brick and The Brothers Bloom.

We start in 2044, where time travel is about 30 years away, but still figures prominently in the lives of “loopers,” assassins hired by a futuristic crime syndicate to kill and dispose of targeted baddies transported from the future.

It’s an insidiously efficient system: A looper waits in the middle of nowhere for a hooded victim to materialize from thin air, only to promptly blast the poor bastard to smithereens. And when it’s time to clear up loose ends, the looper is sent his future older self to kill.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt (The Dark Knight Rises) is Joe, a looper who makes the costly mistake of failing to whack his older self (Bruce Willis, The Expendables 2) when he is supposed to. But old Joe arrives in 2044 with his own agenda to stop a certain future from taking shape, a quest that eventually involves a tough single mom (Emily Blunt, The Five-Year Engagement) living in a farmhouse.

Looper is fiercely inventive, buoyed by strong performances and an intriguingly complex screenplay. In the rarified air of great time-travel flicks, it deserves a place alongside The Terminator, Back to the Future and 12 Monkeys.

Hey! Read This:
• The Dark Knight Rises film review

The Last Exorcism Part II

The ABCs of Death

Ninja III: The Domination

Lifeforce

Dead Souls

Looper

It's a real time killer.