Loop­er

Say what you want about Rian John­son, but he’s not for turn­ing. The film­mak­er, who made a splash with Brick before drown­ing in The Broth­ers Bloom, has dou­bled down with his most styl­ish, vio­lent and out-there offer­ing to date. Loop­er is an almost-clas­sic slice of alt-sci-fi, a time-trav­el film of dar­ing and vision that near­ly but not quite col­laps­es under the weight of its own ambition.

As is often the case with these things, the plot is a tan­gled web of inter­sect­ing per­spec­tives, real­i­ties and pos­si­bil­i­ties – some realised; oth­ers not. Joseph Gor­don-Levitt is Joe, a ​‘loop­er’, a con­tract killer employed in 2042 (here realised as a steam­punk mash-up of Blade Run­ner, Chil­dren of Men and Akira’s Neo Tokyo) to mur­der the vic­tims of a crim­i­nal syn­di­cate 30 years in the future. But every loop will even­tu­al­ly be closed – the loop­er forced to kill a future ver­sion of himself.

For this he’ll receive a pay­out, a pink slip, a pat on the back and 30 years to come to terms with the fact that his card is marked. No won­der Joe lives every day like it’s his last – some­where in the future it is. But when the day final­ly arrives in his own present that Joe comes face-to-face with his future self (Bruce Willis), every­thing changes. It’s here that Loop­er begins a series of extra­or­di­nary spasms, jerk­ing one way then the oth­er through a nar­ra­tive of child mur­der, com­ic- book vengeance and mutant X‑kids.

It’s a gen­uine­ly shock­ing, often baf­fling, some­times ropey, but nev­er less than com­pelling trip through the nether regions of Johnson’s mind as processed through the movies of Rid­ley Scott, James Cameron, Frank Miller and Shane Car­ruth. As old­er Joe says to him­self (well, his oth­er self) in a din­er scene, it’s best not to think about it too hard. And where, in anoth­er film, that would be an admis­sion of fail­ure, here it makes sense.

We’ve all seen enough time-trav­el movies to know that cer­tain log­ic-traps are best ignored, and John­son earns the right to this sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief. Loop­er is so com­mit­ted to its own spe­cial brand of crazy that it begins to make a kind of beguil­ing sense. In amongst oth­er weird­ness, Gor­don- Levitt spends the whole film encased in a light dust­ing of facial pros­thet­ics and CGI. He looks like an alien pre­tend­ing to be Joseph Gor­don-Levitt, until you realise he’s actu­al­ly a human pre­tend­ing (bril­liant­ly) to be Bruce Willis.

Willis him­self re-enacts the man­ic hys­te­ria of James Cole from Twelve Mon­keys, before com­mit­ting one act (albeit off cam­era) that some audi­ences may find hard to for­give. Loop­er exists in a con­stant state of ten­sion, push­ing the lim­its of both moral­i­ty and credulity.

But it’s spurred on by big­ger ques­tions. What would you do for the life you thought you deserved? What price would you pay today if the wages of sin weren’t exact­ed for 30 years? This is so near­ly the kind of movie that killed Richard Kelly’s career: mil­len­ni­al, gar­ish and uncom­pro­mis­ing to a fault. But it swag­gers around with such con­fi­dence that it suc­ceeds through sheer force of per­son­al­i­ty. Where the ascetic grandeur of Prometheus was ici­ly pris­tine, Loop­er dirt­ies up the sci-fi genre in the most refresh­ing way.