4) Looper (2012)
One of the best written films in recent times, Looper proved that movies nowadays can still have a brain, and can still be hugely entertaining. All credit must go to filmmaker Rian Johnson, who harnesses the conventions and paradoxical inconsistencies that go hand in hand with time travel in a completely original homage to the pace-setters that came before him. After seeing his ‘ode-to-a-noir’ high-school thriller, Brick, movie buffs guessed he was a director capable of churning out a razor sharp script, and after the brief misstep that was The Brothers Bloom, we can confirm that Looper is a glorious return to form.
In a future when time travel exists, the mob uses the outlawed technology to send undesirables back into the past where a hired hand waits with a blunderbuss (great name for a gun, we know) to finish them off and dispose of the body. These killers, known as loopers (hence the title), do this until they have ‘closed the loop’ – execute an older version – thirty years senior to be exact – of the looper sent back in time. They then collect a golden pay check and start to enjoy early retirement (‘not the most forward-thinking of people’ quips Joseph Gordon-Levitt). But when the protagonist Joe (Levitt) allows his older self (Bruce Willis) to escape, things get a little more complicated.
Bruce Willis, who’s back in the genre after so long, turns out his best performance since 12 Monkeys oddly enough as the troubled elder Joe. He’s sour and he’s angry for the wrongs done to him, and he sees the past as the only place he can fix the fractured future. Joseph Gordon-Levitt on the other hand has an entirely different beast to wrangle. Caked in prosthetics and make-up he channels shades of a Die Hard Willis with eerie realism in a role that really shows off his acting chops. They say actors have to inhabit the skin of another being … well, Levitt well and truly inhabits the skin of another actor as Joe in a turn which deserves a lot more recognition than others give him credit for.
Personally, this is one of my favorite sci-fi films – nay, favorite films – of the last twenty years, if you haven’t seen it do yourself a favor and catch it as soon as you can!