Saturday 6 October 2012

If Looper's the future, I think I'm off to Dignitas

I went to see Looper last night.  It was set in the future but it was all dusty, and people were driving round in beaten up old cars, and shooting each other with blunderbusses.  This is not the future I want.

I want the future like in I Robot where I can get a big smooth shiny Audi that drives itself, and a personal slave robot who, until he goes mad and tries to kill me, does whatever I ask him to.

I don't want a future like in Waterworld either, where people are going round on boats collecting soil and living on rusty oil tankers.  I want tin foil everywhere, shiny stuff and frickin' lazers.

And that wasn't the only thing about Looper.  To make it almost impossible for him to act the main actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt had been given a prosthetic face to make him look more like Bruce Willis.  I haven't seen such an unconvincing mask since Vanilla Sky.  Even my favourite actress Emily Blunt couldn't save the film.

It was so bloody loud as well.  There was hardly a minute went by without some poor sod getting blown away.  Most of the victims were bound, gagged and hooded and just got gunned down as soon as they landed in the past.  At least there's normally a bit of running about before folk get shot, this was like watching somebody shoot fish in a barrel.

It was totally and utterly humourless as well.  It was like watching Terminator 2 or Back to the Future with all the humour taken out.  Bits of it did remind me of other films but I found that mostly depressing too because they were all films I'd rather be watching instead.

It's rare that I dislike a film before the opening credits have finished but I think I managed it with this one.  And not since Justin Timberlake in In Time have I seen such wooden acting.  They could have got a plank to play Bruce Willis, and by the end I was wishing I'd hit myself with one.  Films are meant to be escapism, but with this one I could actually feel my life slipping away minute by minute.

Ruth mostly slept through it, she said it was such a monotonous shoot-em-up-athon she thought she'd just skip the middle two hundred shootings and just wake up in time for the ride home.

The sad thing is, I generally love time travel films.  I like getting my brain scrambled by shit like the Grandfather paradox, but with this one, I couldn't even be bothered to do any thinking.  I remember going to see Timecop with Jean Claude Van Damme about 15 years ago, and that certainly wasn't the best film in the time travel genre, but it was like Citizen Kane compared to this tosh.

If I had a time machine myself, if I could cobble one together out of bits of old bike and half used tins of paint out of the garage, I could do a lot worse than go back to yesterday, and go see something else instead.....or failing that I could just stick my head in a bowl of custard for two hours.  It would probably be just as good.


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