01 November 2012

LOOPER

This is the latest vehicle starring Joseph-Gordon Levitt. The other main stars include Bruce Willis, Emily Blunt, Jeff Daniels and Xu Qing.

They transform the adorable Joseph with prosthetic into a totally different person, who somehow managed to disgust me, to make him resemble a younger Bruce. Set in the future in 2044 where 10% of the population possessed telekinesis through mutation of their genes and 2074 where time travel was invented, it tracks the life of a looper - a professional killer in 2044 hired by a criminal boss known as the Rainmaker from the future to kill off their targets and dispose off their bodies in present time with reward in the form of silver bars.

Complications arose when the older Joe was captured and sent by the Rainmaker to the present via a time machine to be killed by the younger Joe, to terminate their contract to close the loop. Opposition to this was punishable by death Before being held captive, the old Joe was living in bliss with a newfound love played by Xu Qing and fought hard to stay alive so that he can change the course of history by killing the young Rainmaker to save his love interest from being killed. That was when both the young and old Joe met Sara and her only son Cid who lived in a farm.

The old Joe managed to track down three children with the same birthday as the Rainmaker and killed the innocent boys one at a time. After killing off two children, he was on to kill the third, who turned out to be Cid. Determined to save Cid after becoming close with Sara, the younger Joe turned against his older self. It was also then that Joe discovered that Cid was a freak, possessed very strong telekinetic powers and was capable of turning violent and killing people when he was enraged. When the younger Joe realized that if the older him killed Sara, that was the tipping point that pushed Cid over the edge to become the future ruthless Rainmaker if he witnessed the brutal murder of his mum, he had to make a tough choice to sacrifice his own life instead so that his older self would cease to exist, thereby dissolving the danger faced by Sara and her son.

The science fiction action movie started off quite promisingly but somewhat lost steam along the way. What was a time travel assassination eventually turned out to be a horrifying "Rosemary's child" adaptation. It wasn't as good and enjoyable as I thought it would be though.