Except that in Looper, the make-up team have slapped some extra facial chops on him to make his cheeks look a bit more like Bruce Willis. Ironically, this does not seem to affect Joseph's acting chops and he does eerily look like a younger Bruce. After I got used to the strange make-up choice of the producers, I began to enjoy the film. It is a tale about a hitman who works in the past for the mafia in the future who send back their targets to be killed 30 years before, at a time when their bodies can be disposed of more easily. Of course, you guessed it! What does the main character do, when the victim sent back 30 years in the past to be killed by him....is..actually his future self? I won't ruin it for you, but what follows is a very interesting story.
It is an exceptionally well written script with a quite a complicated moral conundrum at the centre of the story. Essentially the question asked is...if you could go back in time and kill a ruthless leader when he was child, to prevent the destruction of so many lives in the future, would you do so? Could you kill the child in present to prevent him becoming the man you suspect he will be in the future?
There is also the overwhelming themes of how far you would go to save your own life or the life of your child. And the fierce bond between mother and son and how sad it can be when a boy grows up without a loving parent. All of this was expertly explored in subtle and at times not so subtle ways (there is a scene where a little boy, when mistreated by an adult, goes crazy and destroys a house with his telekinesis powers) . But unfortunately any status the film may have garnered as a thought-provoking intelligent scifi film was completely blown out of the water by the amount of pointless violent action strewn throughout the most of the movie.
Generally I am not a fan of violence in movies, aside from all the moral arguments about projecting widely unrealistic violent untruths to young people (If you hit someone over the head with a chair, they will not get back up, if you kick them in the stomach you will rupture their spleen, you will break your hand punching someone etc.), I just find violence kind of boring and uninteresting to watch. I find violence against women and children in films particularly upsetting. I guess I just hate the idea of people being in pain and I don't see the point in watching upsetting drama in my spare time. Plus the Ritzy cinema in Brixton had, for some unknown reason, turned up the volume of the film way too loud and so every punch, gun shot and smack sounded like someone was smashing a large pumpkin against the side of my head.
All the characters in the film seemed overly ready to punch each other shoot at anything that moved and also to slam their hands on desks for emphasis or to slam car doors shut aggressively. After a while, all I could hear was a series of root vegetables being whacked on a concrete counter-top with a large wooden hammer. When Bruce Willis got out two huge machine guns and sprayed a whole bunch of young faceless film extras with bullets, I began to see where crazy Americans who buy guns from Walmart and then shoot up their work places, probably get their ideas from. It just all seemed so pointless and head-ache inducing. My husband winced beside me and we both squeezed our fingers into our ears.
I got the point of the violence. The filmakers were trying to show a future where despite the technological advances, most of the population lived in abject poverty, addicted to drugs and quick to distrust their fellow humans. Life was supposed be portrayed as cheap in this dystopian view of our future. Nevertheless I felt the violence let the film down. It eclipsed the good plot, the sharp script and the genuine compassion you felt for the main character and his dilemma.
As my husband put it, 'Well maybe Bruce Willis can only act well with a machine gun in his hands?'
No comments:
Post a Comment