Waste of time

Rating: 1/10 (8 October 2012)

Rian Johnson fiction film (as it contains no science) Looper should be the line in the sand to say enough. Cinema going has turned into such a trite state that a film like this could be critically acclaimed and mass released. In the day and age of no heart films, torture porn and saccharine dramas we again have to endure the waste of time, resources and column space that a films like this garners. At a time when other worthwhile films slip into obscurity of small openings and DVD bargain bins.
Looper commits the most atrocious of cinematic crimes it abuses the viewers trust in a way that even Von Trier would be embarrassed by in all his emotion manipulation. Looper's first thirty minutes run by smoothly. It appears self-assured, paced confidently and even though the science and exposition is at best first grader and a worst lazy film- making we can forgive all of this and just go with it. Taking in the sub-standard portrayal of the future with none of the background social commentary of other genre films. Apart from some lazy shorthand referencing Doretha Lang's depression photograph of Mother With Seven Children replaced with future vagrant mother and child leaving behind any social cause and effect.
Then as Bruce Willis Old Joe meets Joseph Gordon Levitt's Young Joe the prosthetics take on a comically feel (recalling Pachino's villain in Dick Tracy). We feel we are getting to the meat of the story instead we find derivative shoot-outs, chases and uncompelling dialogue. At this point it all falls apart and the film runs into the dangerous space that modern cinema is not only touching on but beginning to permanently occupy.
The portrayal of females in the film is typical of the misogynistic movement in modern America's cinema. Women are passive objects to be both lusted and tortured. In Lopper all the women portrayed are Whores or Junkies or have a perverse struggle with motherhood.
Emily Blunt's character is given a back-story from a daytime drama. She shown to have no motivation apart from giving into compulsion. Any chance at positive female representation is at utter loss when she makes an-out-of nowhere unconvincing booty call with her child's adapted frog toy to Young Joe. This scene is complete with ridiculously out of place romantic piano score. One gets the feeling the film-makers have misogynist issues that should have been worked out in therapy and not in celluloid.
Before all of this trite we get Bruce Willis's terrible act of killing a child an act in cinema that Hitchcock in his conversations with Truffaut remarked is a guaranteed way to lose an audience. It has been done with a level of respect in films such as Afflecks Gone Baby Gone. In Looper it is unforgivable not only because of the act, but also in the way Johnson manipulates the audience and scenario for maximum effect (making him parallel with pushers of Torture Porn).
We are asked to believe that a child straight off a Disney set walks into the wrong film and towards a pretty suburb home, which is unguarded, in this state of societal collapse and mass crime. All this is for effect so when Old Joe shoots him we are more shocked, more horrified It is one of the more distasteful and undoubtedly manipulative scenes in recent cinema.
At the midway point the films personality splits, and it turns into a horror film about telekinetic abilities? In what seems like a pinned on sub-plot brought to the fore because they didn't know how to end the film. The ending of self-sacrifice was a laughable attempt at catharsis.
This infantile film should be laughed off the screens, especially given the sub-standard performances, Emily Blunts failure at acting 101 in the miming smoking scene comes to mind, .
Critics drawing positive attention even with the quip that it entertains should be ashamed. The role of the critic should be to enlighten. To shine a light towards the possibly unseen both within popular entertainment films and the unseen films that push the art form forwards.