Picoreview: Looper: I’m going to be the one who didn’t like this movie. It wasn’t JG-L or Bruce Willis, both of whom I adore, even if JG-L looks about as much like Bruce Willis as I do. Possibly less, even, even with the makeup (though there were two or three moments in the film where between the makeup and body language he absolutely *nailed* Willis). Emily Blunt was wonderful. I recognize that my really specific problems with the violence are what one might call “trigger issues”, but even looking beyond that, there were too many things that just didn’t work for me.
Major spoilers behind the cut.
Let’s get this out of the way: the main reason I didn’t like Looper was the violence done to and by children. As a mother of a little boy with a mouth full of baby teeth, I *really* had issues with this. They completely lost me when the first kid died, and I hadn’t been real happy with it previous to that. The later violence done *by* the child–look, I know it’s a movie, I know the kid wasn’t exposed to the visuals of what he was acting out doing, but I. Had. Issues. So okay. The movie did not work for me from that aspect at all. At all.
But there was other stuff too. Selling out his best friend, okay, these are not good people, that’s fine. What I didn’t buy was that the torturers could do that much damage to somebody in 15 minutes and keep them alive. Even if it took the future loop more than 15 minutes to get to the location–even if it took a couple of hours–just no. To hurt somebody that badly and keep them alive you would need days, if not weeks. The body would just die of shock, nevermind the damage done to it. And I did not believe that leaving somebody alive in that wrecked state was any different, in terms of changing the future, than killing them would be.
Why did Emily Blunt know what Loopers even were? I kept waiting for it to turn out *she* was a Looper, but no, the story wasn’t that clever. Okay, she hung with the wrong crowd, so maybe she learned about them that way, but given that time travel is used by criminals for very bad deeds, one would think the whole idea of Loopers would be kept pretty hush-hush. So how did she know about them?
I also kept waiting for the big reveal that Young Stupid Fellow with the Colt or whatever his gun was, was actually the young Jeff Daniels. Because why the hell else would Daniels have not just *killed* the young moron? But no. Not that clever.
(I will grant you the whole
“I’m going to France.”
“France? Not China?”
“I’m going to France.”
“Go to China.”
“I’m going to France.”
“I’m from the future. Go to China.”
bit was very funny. The best part of the movie, really.)
And while I recognize that the whole point of the end is that the future is left unwritten, I thought it was a completely flat ending. White-out means “fade to hope”, but…it just stopped, as far as I was concerned. It didn’t finish, it just stopped. And if there were after-credits scenes, I missed them because I was too disgusted to stay and see if they were there to redeem anything.
I just, yeah. Did not like that movie. I think I’ll go watch T2 again. :p