What the hell just happened....?

Rating: 5/10 (22 October 2012)

I must remember to try to disengage myself from the hype surrounding well-reviewed movies.
I'd heard about the high reviews for Looper, which excited me - especially after a dry spell in the theatres. I regret to say I was disappointed.
Those who go on about how inventive, creative and innovative this movie is forget something. Similar (in fact, very similar) themes were explored in the wonderful Terminator movies, and a myriad other movies. This was simply presented differently - with the introduction of the term Looper to make the premise fresh and interesting. I do admit it's not a run-of-the-mill movie; but really - it's all been done before, to quote the Barenaked Ladies.
In trying to be surprising, slick and smart, the movie favours a fractured way of telling the story, which is simply disorienting, and frankly, quite self-indulgent. The constant VO (voiceover) doesn't help either. It's hard to get absorbed by the movie when one can almost feel Rian Johnson thinking: "Ha! This'll confound them!" - and then tossing in some bizarre bits. In other words, it's annoying; and not subtle.
Even the stellar performance of Bruce Willis, and a noteworthy one by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, failed to save this loopy mess. Armed with some vague notion of time travel, the loss of morals, of the struggle between desire and morality, and time conundrums, the film tries to appear more important than it really is - and worse, misleads the audience completely by failing to warn them what they were really in for.
This is because in actual fact, the influence of The Omen and The Sixth Sense (think creepy, mature kid with extraordinary abilities) far superseded that exerted by other time-travel movies. The kid part was simply dodgy and derivative, and came right out of nowhere to leave the audience with raised eyebrows and mental images of Children of the Corn and some M.Night Shyamalan thrown in (not a good thing). Blunt was serviceable, but even her earnest performance failed to help the film rise above its own self-induced mess.
In other words, best avoided.