I honestly can’t remember a time I wasn’t trembling with excitement at the thought of seeing Looper, director Rian Johnson’s time-travel action-thriller that combines his notorious love for noir gangster fare with a twisting mind trip.
Most of us will have to wait until the end of September to finally get a look, but thanks to the reviews pouring in from the Toronto International Film Festival we have it on good word that Looper is one of the year’s best films.
Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis as younger and older versions of the same man (named simply Joe) respectively, Looper finds the doppelgangers pitted against one another after Old Joe is sent back in time by the mob to be killed by his earlier self. The premise at its heart is inventive but seemingly rather straight forward – key word: seemingly.
Check out what some critics have to say:
Variety: “[Rian Johnson’s] grandly conceived, impressively mounted third feature shows a giddy, geeky interest in science-fiction, then forces it into the back seat and lets the multidimensional characters drive.”
Box Office Magazine: “The coolest, most-confident sci-fi flick since 2006’s Children of Men.”
Total Film: “One of the best films of 2012. You’ll immediately want to see it again.”
ComingSoon.net: “A hugely ambitious and mind-blowing sci-fi twist on the gangster flick that’s likely to make it one of the coolest movies of the year.”
IGN: “Looper is one of the year’s most engaging sci-fi films, one that works as both a thriller and a character piece about people faced with making big life decisions (often at the business end of Blunderbuss).”
That’s some pretty glowing praise thus far, and a negative review has yet to surface. Heady sci-fi is so hard to come by these days with fare such as Battleship capitalizing (and ultimately watering down) the genre. Will Looper have enough good will and momentum to carry into awards season like District 9? Ironically, only time will tell.
Be sure to look for Looper in theaters September 28.
(Source: Rotten Tomatoes)
