Joseph Gordon-Levitt IS Bruce Willis IS a Time-Travel-Assassin-For-Hire: LOOPER

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

Also posted in the Chez Tremblay JGL JGL JGL (a thread for Joseph Gordon-Levitt)
http://bettermost.net/forum/index.php/topic,45560.msg631883/topicseen.html#msg631883

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uIWGOKW5OM[/youtube]
Published on Apr 12, 2012 by ENTV

Also posted in the Chez Tremblay JGL JGL JGL (a thread for Joseph Gordon-Levitt)
http://bettermost.net/forum/index.php/topic,45560.msg631883/topicseen.html#msg631883

[Meryl]

That sounds interesting!  Glad you're out there sniffing out these tidbits, John. 

[oilgun]

I'm a sucker for time travel movies.  I'm just not sure I can handle JGL's look.  I understand they were trying to make him look like a young Bruce Willis but it just creeps me out.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

also: click and scroll for video intervew:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/14/joseph-gordon-levitt-looper-bruce-willis_n_1673233.html



Joseph Gordon-Levitt
In
Looper
Actor Reveals How He Became
Bruce Willis For The Film

By DAVID GERMAIN
07/13/12 10:37 PM ET

SAN DIEGO -- The big time-travel paradox of the sci-fi thriller "Looper" is whether Joseph Gordon-Levitt is playing a young Bruce Willis or whether Bruce Willis is playing an old Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

Gordon-Levitt, co-star Emily Blunt and writer-director Rian Johnson gave the Comic-Con fan convention Friday a sneak peek at footage from "Looper," which centers on a hit man who's supposed to kill his future self.

To play the young assassin, Gordon-Levitt, 31, spent three hours in makeup every day to have a prosthetic nose and other cosmetic tweaks applied to make him look more like the 57-year-old Willis.

But much of the transformation comes from Gordon-Levitt's mimicking skills. He says he watched Willis' movies over and over and listened to the actor's dialogue again and again on an iPod.

Much of what he aimed for, however, was capturing the cool essence of Willis, Gordon-Levitt said.

"I'm not a good mimic, to be honest. I don't do good impressions," said Gordon-Levitt, who also co-stars in next week's Batman  finale "The Dark Knight Rises." "I didn't think an impersonation would be appropriate, anyway. It would just be distracting. So I just tried to internalize and do something that made sense to me. ...

"The most I learned from him is just hanging out with him," Gordon-Levitt said. "He's a sweetheart and he loved this job. He was clearly there to play."

The movie opens Sept. 28.

"Looper" is set late in the 21st century, when murder has become difficult to carry out. Time travel allows the mob to get rid of people by sending them into the past, where a hit man awaits and victims can be disposed of with no questions asked.

Johnson had previously directed Gordon-Levitt in the 2005 low-budget drama "Brick," when the filmmaker first raised the idea of the time-travel story. He wound up writing the script specifically with Gordon-Levitt in mind, even naming the character Joe.

"We've just been dying to work with each other again," Johnson said. "It's always best to make movies with your friends."

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2012/09/looper_reviewed_joseph_gordon_levitt_meets_his_future_self_and_he_s_bruce_willis_.html



Looper
Joseph Gordon-Levitt meets his
future-self, and he’s Bruce Willis
By Dana Stevens
Posted Friday, Sept. 28, 2012, at 8:54 AM ET


Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Looper.


Looper  is the third film from Rian Johnson, whose debut feature Brick  (2005) somehow pulled off the brazen gimmick of setting a noir murder mystery in a suburban American high school. Joseph Gordon-Levitt (then known to most audiences as the alien kid on the family sitcom Third Rock from the Sun ) played the lead role—a teenage Sam Spade investigating his girlfriend’s murder—with an alchemically perfect combination of hip detachment and wary melancholy. Gordon-Levitt was already a rising actor, having been singled out by critics in less-mainstream roles, like the gay drifter he played in Gregg Araki’s moody, unforgettable Mysterious Skin.  But it was only after Brick  that he began his steady rise toward household-name status, playing a lovelorn greeting-card designer in (500) Days of Summer,  a brain-cancer patient in 50/50,  and a credible action sidekick in both Inception  and The Dark Knight Rises.

I’m an avowed JGL fan, so the prospect of Gordon-Levitt and Johnson working together again was enticing. So was Looper’s high-concept sci-fi premise: Gordon-Levitt plays a hired assassin whose targets are sent back in time from the future. It’s 2044, and time travel hasn’t yet been invented, but—to employ the future-perfect tense useful mainly for time-travel movies—it will have been invented in 30 years. By that point, a fearful, vaguely post-apocalyptic government will have forbidden any use of the technology ... so, to paraphrase the NRA bumper sticker, when time machines are outlawed, only outlaws will have time machines. Soon the contraptions (which look, pleasingly, like Jules Verne-era bathyspheres) are used solely on the black market, transporting the human garbage of the future back in time for the past to clean up. At least, that's how Joe (Gordon-Levitt) justifies to himself the fact that he makes his living waiting in deserted fields for hooded, cuffed men to appear out of nowhere so he can shoot them with a blunderbuss.

Underground assassins like Joe—members of an organized force led by menacing boss-from-the-future Abe (Jeff Daniels)—are known as “loopers,” for the chilling reason that, after being paid handsomely and given an early retirement that lasts exactly 30 years, they themselves will be captured, sent back in time and killed, thus closing the “loop” of their lives. As the film begins, a new crime lord, a fearsome gangster known as the Rainmaker, has taken over in the future and is issuing new orders about the existing loopers: He wants all their future selves sent back in time and killed immediately, preferably by the younger versions of themselves. (Why exactly this setup would be desirable was one plot point among many that eluded me. Given that the victims from the future are being sent back with their heads covered, why would it matter which looper killed whom?)

Joe’s featherbrained fellow looper Seth (Paul Dano), encountering his own later-self, isn’t able to bring himself to pull the trigger, and the man gets away, resulting in a very bad outcome for both present and future Seths (and the first of several extended bursts of stomach-churning violence). Joe resolves that, when and if his own future self appears in cuffs before him, he won’t hesitate to blow him away—but when that day comes and Joe’s future self turns out to be Bruce Willis, all bets are off.

Future Joe manages to knock Past Joe out cold, take his gun, and head out into the world to find and kill the child destined one day to grow into the Rainmaker. Based on a tip about the super-criminal’s date and place of birth, old Joe has narrowed the candidates down to three small children, one of whom (Pierce Gagnon) is the son of a lonely sugarcane farmer (Emily Blunt) in whose barn young Joe has taken shelter while on the run from Abe’s men, who are now hunting down both Joes with extreme prejudice.

You see where this is going: At some point, Young Joe and Old Joe are going to have to meet up and debrief about the 30 years that separate them, then decide whether they’re going to continue as allies or enemies. The moment this finally happens, in an Edward Hopper-esque diner in the middle of nowhere, was for me the movie’s high point. As they stare at each other in profile over two identical plates of steak and eggs, Willis and Gordon-Levitt, such different types both physically and temperamentally, make a strange sense as each others’ time-traveling avatars, especially since we’re meant to imagine that Joe’s years of hard living to come will make him a coarser, tougher man in middle age. (Levitt was also fitted with facial prosthetics to make his fine-boned face more closely resemble Willis’ craggier features. The nose works; the eyebrows are pushing it.) The diner scene also snaps with smart dialogue that playfully bats around sci-fi clichés; asked by his 2044 self to explicate one of the paradoxes of time travel, 2074 Joe impatiently dismisses the question, insisting they have no time to “start making diagrams with straws.”

Too bad, because a well-thought-out straw diagram might have been able to get me through the movie’s last half-hour, in which timeless philosophical questions of free will vs. destiny, nature vs. nurture, and utilitarian ethics (would you consider killing a child if you knew it meant saving countless future lives from the monster he might grow up to be?) get raised, then chucked aside as the story hurtles to a rushed, gory conclusion that leaves nearly as many plot holes as bullet holes. Saddest of all, after their juicy mid-movie encounter at the diner, Old and Young Joe hardly ever share the screen again, and when they do, it’s mostly to exchange terse remarks and gunfire.

Looper  felt to me like a maddening near-miss: It posits an impossible but fascinating-to-imagine relationship—a face-to-face encounter between one’s present and future self, in which each self must account for its betrayal of the other—and then throws away nearly all the dramatic potential that relationship offers. If someone remakes Looper  as the movie it could have been in, say, 30 years, will someone from the future please FedEx it back to me?

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com//review/looper-movie-review-joseph-gordon-levitt-bruce-willis-368330






Looper
Toronto Review
Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis go head-to-head in
writer-director Rian Johnson's clever science fiction tale.

The Bottom Line:
An engaging, neatly worked-out time-travel sci-fi thriller with
Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt playing the same role.

by Todd McCarthy
8:15 AM PDT 9/6/2012






Looper  is a clever, entertaining science fiction thriller that neatly blurs the line between suicide and murder. An existential conundrum wrapped in a narrowly conceived yarn about victims sent back in time to be bumped off by assassins called loopers, Rian Johnson's third and most ambitious feature keeps the action popping while sustaining interest in the long arc of a story about a man assigned to kill the 30-years-older version of himself. A lively, high-profile choice to open this year's Toronto International Film Festival, this Sony release co-starring Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the same role should chalk up sizable returns in the wake of its Sept. 28 theatrical bow.

Probably the shakiest aspect of Johnson's original screenplay is what it asks the viewer to buy about the future: A mere 62 years from now, in 2074, time travel has become possible, but such a momentous breakthrough is limited to serving as a body-disposal system. Under the prevailing authority, time jumping is strictly outlawed because of its potential for messing with history. A large criminal mob, run by an overlord called The Rainmaker, defiantly uses it but only as a vehicle for assassination, with “loopers” -- disreputable gunmen living in 2044 -- laying in wait for people to execute so no bodies or other evidence can be found in the future.

But the premise is established in nifty fashion; the doomed, hooded with hands bound behind them, suddenly materialize in an empty field, and the looper immediately blows him away with his blunderbuss. One such executioner is Joe (Gordon-Levitt), a retro-looking hipster who drives a very old red Miata and wears ties, “a 20th century affectation” that offends his crankily genial boss, Abe (Jeff Daniels). If he can get out of this racket, he says he'd like to go to France, which earns him further scorn from the older man; “I'm from the future, you should go to China,” he scolds.

Backed by a cynically confessional voice-over track from Joe that is not as self-consciously hardboiled as the commentary Gordon-Levitt read for Johnson in Brick  seven years ago, Looper mostly is set in a seedy metropolis that doesn't look all that different from sketchy neighborhoods in some big cities today; there are derelicts, bombed-out buildings, ruined cars and enough other signs of urban ills to suggest that, in Johnson's view, things will just gradually decline over the next three decades.

Joe hangs out in clubs, sees a sexy woman (Piper Perabo) who works in one of them and tries to help a friend and fellow looper, Seth (Paul Dano), who's imminently endangered by a new development that's come down from on high: They're “closing all the loops,” meaning they're sending the “future selves” of all the loopers back to be killed.

Almost immediately, Joe is in the same jam. When, a half-hour into the film, he goes to the field to do his next job, the guy who pops up to be shot is not hooded. Joe's hesitation allows the older man to escape, and it's clear who he is: It's Joe as his older self. And, for his failure to kill him, young Joe is in a pile of trouble with Abe and his “gats,” first-class hired guns.

When the two Joes finally sit down -- across from each other in a diner in the middle of nowhere -- there's no doubt they're working at cross purposes: Young Joe is determined to kill his older self, while old Joe is dead set on tracking down and taking out The Rainmaker, who would be a little kid in 2044, so his late wife won't die at his hands after all.

The biggest problem facing the makers of Looper is how to make the audience believe that the trim, long-faced Gordon-Levitt could somehow change so much in 30 years that he would look like the thicker-built and shorter-nosed Willis. The solution lay in altering the younger actor's appearance, imperceptibly at first, but gradually to morph his dark eyes into Willis' gray-green and to reshape his nose and eyebrows, either with makeup or digitally or perhaps both. At first, the effect is a bit odd, and you can't quite put your finger on what's off; then it feels downright weird to be looking at a version of Gordon-Levitt who is no longer the actor you've known for a few years now.

This is especially noticeable during the film's second half, much of which takes place at young Joe's place of refuge, the isolated home of feisty young farmer and single mom Sara (Emily Blunt), who has an unusually gifted son, Cid (Pierce Gagnon). Even as the temperature is kept at a low simmer, the film's pace deliberately is slowed here to develop some intimacy between these two isolated people and give some screen time to the kid, who pretty obviously will provide the reason for old Joe to eventually head for the farm. The eventual ending is great, the resolution to the tricky time maneuvering very impressively worked out.

Shot mostly in Louisiana, with a bit done in Shanghai, the film looks tightly made on a budget but sacrifices nothing for that; the world depicted looks dirty, dangerous and ramshackle, with a few high-tech touches here and there.

Their physical disparity notwithstanding, Gordon-Levitt and Willis both come across strongly, while Blunt effectively reveals Sara's tough and vulnerable sides. Daniels is particularly amusing as the garrulous old enforcer holding down the future's outpost in the past.



Opens: Friday, Sept. 28 (Sony)

Production: Film District, Endgame Entertainment, DMG Entertainment, Ram Bergman Prods.

Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Opening Night)

Cast: Bruce Willis, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Emily Blunt, Paul Dano, Noah Segan, Piper Perabo, Jeff Daniels, Pierce Gagnon

Writer-director: Rian Johnson

Producers: Ram Bergman, James D. Stern

Executive producers: Douglas E. Hansen, Julie Goldstein, Peter Schlessel, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Dan Mintz

Director of photography: Steve Yedlin

Production designer: Ed Verreaux

Costume designer: Sharen Davis

Editor: Bob Ducsay

Music: Nathan Johnson

PG-13 rating, 119 minutes

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117948218/





Toronto

Looper
by Peter Debruge
[email protected]
Posted: Thu., Sep. 6, 2012, 8:15am PT





A time-travel twister that pits a ruthless hit man (Joseph Gordon-Levitt)
against his future self (Bruce Willis), "Looper" marks a huge leap forward
for Rian Johnson ("Brick"). His grandly conceived, impressively mounted
third feature shows a giddy, geeky interest in science-fiction, then forces
it into the back seat and lets the multidimensional characters drive. In a
genre infamous for loose ends, this thinking man's thriller marshals
action, romance and a dose of very dark comedy toward a stunning payoff.

Reception should be solid, not stellar, with a long cult afterlife.


In the future, mobsters dispose of unwanted rivals by sending them 30 years back to the past, before time travel has been developed, and into the hands of a team of young screw-ups called "loopers" to do the killing. Why loopers? Because sooner or later, these live-in-the-moment assassins will wind up killing their time-displaced selves -- or "closing the loop." They're rewarded, handsomely, and life is sweet until … well, until time travel is invented and they get booted back to face the barrel of their own blunderbusses.
 
You don't have to be Albert Einstein to know that sending assassins back to the past is a bad idea -- not for a movie, but as a system of gangland garbage disposal. Kick your unwanted trash into the future, and you're rid of it, but blast a career killer back in time, and there's a pretty strong chance the death-marked assassin will irrevocably alter the "future" from which he came if he can manage to escape.
 
That loophole, big enough to drive a plot through, is precisely what makes Johnson's crazy idea work. Joe, played by Gordon-Levitt with pale blue contacts, puffy lips and a fake schnozz that takes some getting used to, is pretty unconflicted about killing strangers from the future, himself included. But when Older Joe arrives in the form of grizzled action star Willis, his 30-years-younger self flinches just long enough for the guy to make his move, knocking Joe unconscious before disappearing into his own past.
 
Now, here's where things get fun for the kind of sci-fi crowd that likes to diagram and debate the logic of time-travel stories. You'd think that Older Joe has the upper hand, able to anticipate the way his younger self reacted, but as cat-and-mouse games go, the young punk has a distinct advantage, since the slightest injury to Gordon-Levitt's body travels forward to appear as scar tissue on Willis.
 
The pic demonstrates just how this works with Joe's sidekick Seth (Paul Dano). After purposefully allowing his older self to escape (or "letting his loop run" in the parlance), Seth hides out at Joe's place -- not a smart idea, considering that Joe prizes money over friendship, and doesn't put up much resistance before surrending Seth to the syndicate chief (Jeff Daniels, whose blood runs cold behind a bearded smile). What follows is a truly disturbing death scene, as Seth's loop (Frank Brennan) tries to hop the nearest train, only to see 30-year-old injuries start to appear all over his body, the result of the younger Seth being sadistically tortured offscreen.
 
Kill the kid and his loop goes, too -- a rule that puts Older Joe in the awkward position of simultaneously having to run from, and protect, his younger self. Trickier from a storytelling standpoint is the fact that auds don't meet Willis until the first-act break, at which point the film must rapidly supply a romantic backstory for a character who, in the present reality, technically does not yet exist. So, while Gordon-Levitt's Joe is a heartless hustler, Willis' older-and-wiser counterpart brings soul to the character, having discovered -- and had to watch die -- the love of his life.
 
Willis can play the tough guy in his sleep, but it's the character's tenderness that makes possible the ruthlessness with which he sets about trying to change his own fate. Thirty years after the story takes place, a mysterious figure called "the Rainmaker" has risen to power, and in classic "Terminator" fashion, Older Joe has the rare chance to strangle the monster in his crib. His only clues are the kid's birthdate and mythology: They say he has a synthetic jaw and that he watched his mom die.
 
While Willis single-mindedly begins to hunt down and execute 10-year-olds, Gordon-Levitt tracks down a lead that points him toward an isolated Kansas farmhouse where Sara (Emily Blunt, stunning enough to suggest a new future for Joe) and son Cid (Pierce Gagnon) have cut themselves off from modern society, leading to the inevitable confrontation between the two Joes -- and a twist that not only rewards the intricate character work of the pic's laggy middle hour but beautifully ties everything together.
 
Complicated as it all sounds, Johnson paves the way with wall-to-wall voiceover. As in "Brick," the script's well-tooled lines are stilted enough to sound cool, and angled in the direction of comedy, relying on expressions less suggestive of a sci-fi future than they are of vintage film noir. Face-to-face with himself, young Joe hisses, "Why don't you do what old men do, and die?" For both thesps, the challenging roles amount to playing near-nihilism, while also subtly absorbing one another's characteristics.
 
The two actors look nothing alike, of course, which wouldn't be a big deal, if Johnson hadn't tried so hard to force a resemblance, burying Gordon-Levitt's striking mug under prosthetics (the most distracting being an application meant to simulate Willis' unique beak) instead of simply trusting auds to care enough about Joe to see past the differences. Still, Johnson steps up to the pic's practical challenges nicely, balancing high-caliber action with intricate character work. The support team leverages Louisiana to suggest a 30-year-distant Kansas (and Shanghai for locations 30 years farther down the line) without requiring too many effects, though the digital work looks convincing when needed. The loopers' signature weapon, essentially a sawed-off shotgun with a Steampunk twist, is evocative of both past and future. If the imperfect yet promising "Brick" teased an exciting new voice, then "Looper" suggests big things ahead.



Sony Pictures Entertainment release of a TriStar Pictures, FilmDistrict, Endgame Entertainment presentation in association with DMG Entertainment of a Ram Bergman production. (International sales: FilmNation Entertainment, Los Angeles.) Produced by Bergman, James D. Stern. Executive producers, Douglas E. Hansen, Julie Goldstein, Peter Schlessel, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Dan Mintz. Co-producers, Dave Pomier, Eleanor Nett, Lucas Smith, Christopher C. Chen. Directed, written by Rian Johnson.

Old Joe Bruce Willis Joe Joseph Gordon-Levitt Sara Emily Blunt Seth Paul Dano Kid Blue Noah Segan Suzie Piper Perabo Abe Jeff Daniels Cid Pierce Gagnon Old Joe's Wife Summer Qing

Camera (color, widescreen), Steve Yedlin; editor, Bob Ducsay, music, Nathan Johnson; production designer, Ed Verreaux; art directors, James Gelarden, Scott Plauche; set decorator, Katherine Verreaux; costume designer, Sharen Davis; supervising sound editor/sound designer, Jeremy Peirson; re-recording mixers, Tim LeBlanc, Peirson; special effects coordinator, David Nami; visual effects supervisor, Karen Goulekas; visual effects producer, Dane Allan Smith; visual effects, Hydraulx, Scanline VFX, Atomic Fiction, Base-FX Beijing, Pixel Magic, Incessant Rain Studios; stunt coordinator, Steven Ritzi; assistant director, Nicholas Mastandrea; second unit camera, Jaron Presant; casting, Mary Vernieu, Lindsay Graham. Reviewed at Sony Studios, Culver City, Calif., Aug. 28, 2012. (In Toronto Film Festival -- Gala Presentations, opener.) MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 119 MIN.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/sep/06/looper-review-toronto?newsfeed=true



review
Four Stars

Toronto
Looper
Rian Johnson's thriller about hitmen who assassinate targets
sent from the future opens the Toronto film festival
in fine style and runs rings around most recent sci-fi releases

By Henry Barnes
guardian.co.uk
Thursday 6 September 2012 18.59 EDT


Smooth riders... Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Paul Dano in a scene from
Looper.


Kansas 2044. Time travel will be invented in 30 years' time and quickly made illegal. It will be used only by criminal gangs to send targets back to Loopers, cold-blooded killers employed to murder decades away from detection. The victim arrives out of thin air, hands tied, head covered. The Looper pulls the trigger, collects his cut of "silver" – brickettes of precious metal attached to the mark's back – and burns the body. Once in a blue moon the target arrives strapped in gold – the first sign that the Looper's contract has been terminated. He rolls the body over, takes off the mask and confirms that he's killed himself. His loop's been closed.

Rian Johnson's sharp, smart sci-fi thriller runs on such bizarre ritual. Delayed suicide is part of the cycle for Loopers like Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who's eager for the chance to tap out and enjoy his last 30 years as he wants. His life until then is locked in a well-worn circuit – an assassination, steak and eggs at his favourite diner, a quick flirt with the waitress, then the trip to the city with the same clubs, the same drugs, the same girls. Around him the economy has flatlined. Only Joe and his kind – well paid, stylish, arrogant playboys – have the money to zip around in sleek flying machines.

Joe's expecting to meet and kill himself. It's only when his older self (Bruce Willis) escapes assassination that the system is undone. Joe senior has seen the future, likes where it leads and doesn't want to give it up. Joe junior, mindful of the punishment that's dealt out to renegades by his boss (Jeff Daniels), needs to track him down and finish the job.

From there, Johnson hauls us through a cat-and-mouse chase, peppered with great dialogue and two showcase performances from Willis and Gordon-Levitt, who's nailed the pained look of befuddlement, the mannered slouch in the walk, that made Willis a star. Even when Johnson winds down their screentime to make room for a side story featuring a prairie mom (Emily Blunt) and her mysteriously gifted son, Looper  still ticks along.

Johnson's debut, Brick,  asked a lot of its audience, incited you to keep up. Those who found his noirish high-school murder mystery too portenteous might struggle with Looper.  At its best, it's a similarly dense film. But, once you commit to the lexicon – to the blunderbusses, the silver, the loops that close and the loops let run – you're in for a breathless ride. It's been a patchy summer for sci-fi, absent of anything that really sticks in the mind. Johnson's deep, distinctive film plays on repeat.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://movies.nytimes.com/2012/09/28/movies/looper-with-bruce-willis-and-joseph-gordon-levitt.html?ref=global-home&_r=0



Movie Review
In What Universe
Does This Guy Turn
Into Bruce Willis?
Looper
With Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt

By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: September 27, 2012




“Looper,” an obstreperously entertaining, bullet- and attitude-ridden science-fiction pastiche, opens in a futuristic world that looks and sounds paradoxically out of the past. Set in 2074, in a dystopia with Turner Classic Movies flavor, it puts a spin on the familiar figure of the existentially troubled gun for hire while leaving a layer of dust on many of the other genre fundamentals it plays with. Some of it you’ve seen and heard before, intentionally so, though it adds a weird wrinkle: an attempt to transform Joseph Gordon-Levitt, his nose prosthetically bobbed and a smirk surfing his thinned upper lip, into the wisecracking Bruce Willis of the “Moonlighting” years.

The ostensible reason for Mr. Gordon-Levitt’s extreme makeover is that he and Mr. Willis are playing the same contract killer, Joe, at different ages. A looper, the young Joe works for an outfit that exists 30 years beyond 2074, where time travel exists but is illegal. Whenever the outfit wants to dispose of a “problem,” it sends the problem with a hood over his head into the past where a looper is waiting with a gun to blow him to smithereens. The hook — you can almost hear the original movie pitch it’s so tidy — is that every so often the outfit sends back an older looper, who’s unknowingly killed by his younger self, which is how the 2074 Joe stares down his middle-aged counterpart.

It isn’t a happy meeting, but the writer and director Rian Johnson makes it a largely diverting one, filled with wit, smashing edits and showy, at times distracting allusions that reflect his cleverness like little mirrors. Slamming genre cheap thrills together with high-art aspirations, Mr. Johnson spins a fast-moving entertainment out of a setup that could have been cooked up by the science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick and was undoubtedly influenced by Chris Marker’s cinematic touchstone from 1962, “La Jetée,” in which scientists in a postapocalyptic world send, as the film puts it, “emissaries into time to call past and future to the rescue of the present.” The middle-aged Joe sets off on a similar mission, trying to persuade his younger self to go along.

It’s a juicy premise, ripe for the squeezing, though it takes a while to get over Joe’s looking less like a young Mr. Willis and more like Keanu Reeves with a dash of Marlon Brando doing Japanese minstrel for “The Teahouse of the August Moon.” Mr. Johnson throws a lot at the screen, blasted corpses included, yet little here is as initially transfixing as Mr. Gordon-Levitt’s mug. The makeover is a distracting miscalculation and a curious one given that, for his last movie, “The Brothers Bloom,” Mr. Johnson cast the non look-alikes Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo in the title roles. Even so, after the bodies and plot twists pile up, and after you’ve scoped out the Bruce-ified downward curve of Mr. Gordon-Levitt’s nose and laughed when he worriedly touches his receding hairline, the movie starts getting its groove on.

There’s a lot to get past, including an antediluvian divide between hard-charging men and decorative dames, including a stripper, Suzie (Piper Perabo), who works at a club called La Belle Aurore, the name of the Paris joint where Humphrey Bogart once met Ingrid Bergman. As time goes by, indeed, or as Mr. Johnson prefers, loops the loop. (Using some metaphysical shorthand he also alludes to the cosmic cup of coffee brewed by Jean-Luc Godard in “Two or Three Things I Know About Her.”) Things, or rather the gender politics, improve once Joe, fleeing the outfit — with his older self nearby — takes refuge at a farmhouse belonging to Sara (an appealing Emily Blunt), a single mom with a strange little boy, Cid (an excellent Pierce Gagnon). There, Mr. Johnson settles into something deeper, swaps the banter for real feelings and wins you over.

“Looper” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Lots of gun deaths.



Looper

Opens on Friday nationwide.

Written and directed by Rian Johnson; director of photography, Steve Yedlin; edited by Bob Ducsay; music by Nathan Johnson; production design by Ed Verreaux; costumes by Sharen Davis; produced by Ram Bergman and James D. Stern; released by TriStar Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes.

WITH: Bruce Willis (Old Joe), Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Joe), Emily Blunt (Sara), Paul Dano (Seth), Noah Segan (Kid Blue), Piper Perabo (Suzie), Summer Qing (Old Joe’s Wife), Jeff Daniels (Abe) and Pierce Gagnon (Cid).