FILM REVIEW OF "LOOPER" (2012)

“Looper” (* out of ****) qualifies as a sordid science fiction thriller about time travel with an awful ending.  Stir a little H.G. Wells in with some Stephen King and add a pinch of “The Sopranos,” and you’ve got the basics of “Brick” director Rian Johnson’s contrived, unconvincing chronicle.  Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt are cast as one in the same character in this disappointing actioneer that pits them against each other with a no-win outcome.  Furthermore, both protagonists emerge as more anti-heroic than heroic.  If you dismiss the fact these talented thespians bear scant resemblance to each other, you must still consider the scarcity of information about a distant future as well as a warped premise.  These shortcomings constitute the chief flaws in this imaginative but predictable sci-fi saga that unfolds in an erratic manner, lacks quotable dialogue, and features one character with no qualms about shooting innocent adolescents. By the time this uninspired, R-rated, 118-minute, spectacle has worn out its welcome; you have no reason to care about anybody, including an obnoxious telekinetic tyke who doesn’t know when to keep his trap shut.  Mind you, the future has never appeared more dystopian.  Some people are born with a mutation that enables them to levitate objects, and these fellows find that they can lure facile-minded babes into bed by making quarters float above the palms of their hands.  The economy has hit bottom, and vagrancy has become epidemic. Citizens can execute vagrants on the spot if they feel so inclined.  Any time Hollywood undertakes a time travel tale, the filmmakers conjure up some of the ugliest vehicles.  While the cars and trucks look hopelessly tacky, the motorcycles resemble something Luke Skywalker wouldn't ride.  Basically, you see a guy straddling a cylinder with handle bars.  Computer-generated special effects blur everything beneath his feet so he appears to be cruising on a cushion of air. 

Johnson’s screenplay is as amoral as his narrative premise is warped.  Imitating the best Mafia movies of director Martin Scorsese, Johnson relies on the voice-over narration of his lead character to acquaint us not only with his unusual profession but also with the seedy world where he thrives.  Kansas in the year 2044 serves as the setting.  Presumably, Johnson is making an ironic “Wizard of Oz” joke with his futuristic fable.  The premise of “Looper” is that a guy can live the high life by killing individuals from the future who have been sent back to the past.  Joseph Simmons (Joseph Gordon-Levitt of “The Dark Knight Rises”) is a killer who was brought up the ranks by his boss, Abe (Jeff Daniels of “Blood Work”), to do his dirty work.  Actually, Abe was beamed back from the future to coordinate the equivalent of Murder Incorporated.  In the 1940s, the Mafia relied on hired gunmen from out of town to ice enemies on their own turf.  For example, if the New York Mafia wanted to dispose of an adversary, they contracted a Chicago gunsel to eliminate him.  The rationale was that the authorities always sought a motive.  What motive would a Chicago mobster have for killing New York mobster that he didn’t know?  This remained standard operating procedure until the authorities figured out the connection.  

Mobsters in the year 2074 cannot murder their adversaries because humans have become too easy to track.  Since the mob cannot kill their own, they contract hits out to mobsters from the past.  Gunman designated ‘loopers’ kill and dispose of these victims that the mob has beamed back so nobody can find them.  Our hero wields an exotic shotgun called a ‘blunderbuss,’ and the looper waits near a cornfield in the middle of nowhere with his weapon and a tarp spread on the ground.  Eventually, a bound man with a bag over his head and silver ingots strapped to his back materializes.  After he murders his prey, Joseph incinerates him so no traces remain. When a gangland assassin in the future has worn out his welcome, however, the mob sends him back to the past so he can kill himself.  They call this ‘closing the loop.’ After Young Joe botches the job of killing Old Joe, he has to dodge the bullets of his former associates—known as ‘gat-men’--until he can corner and kill himself. Losing one’s older self is referred to as ‘letting his loop run.’  Joe’s quick-witted alter-ego from the future (Bruce Willis of “Twelve Monkeys”) escapes and searches for a mysterious person code named the ‘Rainmaker.’  This enigmatic individual wants to eradicate any trace of the loopers.  Older Joe has been given a map with three possible addresses for this ‘Rainmaker.’  Joe wants to wreak vengeance on the ‘Rainmaker’ because the ladder dispatched trigger-happy gunmen who accidentally murdered his Asian wife. 

Instead of keeping things simple, Johnson complicates matters with a subplot about a kid with telekinetic powers.  Cid (Pierce Gagnon of “The Crazies”) lives on a sugar cane farm with his mom, Sara (Emily Blunt of “The Adjustment Bureau”), who runs the place by herself.  One of the locations that the Old Joe has is Sara’s farm.  He suspects Cid may be the reason that assassins are knocking themselves off.  Essentially, what we have here is a good assassin and a bad assassin who share the same body from drastically different decades.  Young Joe stakes out Sara’s farm so he can terminate Old Joe with extreme prejudice.  This uneven, poorly-plotted, high body count stinker doesn’t flow well and is often confusing, too.  Moreover, the logic is questionable.  Wouldn’t it be easier for the future mob to kill their enemies and send the remains back to the past for disposal?  Furthermore, what would happen if the victim that they sent back managed to escape like Old Joe and gum up the works?  As far as that goes, how does Abe know when a man is going to be sent back to the past. In most movies, you look for a character that you can either love or envy.  Nobody is lovable in “Looper” and parts of this movie are just plain downright dull.

REVIEW OF ''THE BIG HEAT'' (1953)

Tennessee Democratic Senator Carey Estes Kefauver became synonymous with the Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce that convened during 1950. The Kefauver hearings took place in 14 cities, and 600 witnesses testified as a part of them. Prominent gangland figures, among them Willie Moretti, Joe Adonis, and Frank Costello, appeared before the committee. Not only did these televised hearings wreck some political careers but also the hearings advanced others, such as Everett Dirksen, while the hearings publicized for the first time the idea of a criminal syndicate called 'the Mafia.' The Kefauver hearings exerted considerable influence on Hollywood, too. Revelations of organized crime’s pervasive corruption of America furnished filmmakers with fresh plots. The hearings forged an entire subgenre of crime movies about Mafia corruption in city hall, including “The Enforcer” (1951) with Kefauver appearing in a forward, “The Mob” (1951), “Kansas City Confidential” (1952), “Captive City” (1952), and “Hoodlum Empire” (1952). Fritz Lang’s “The Big Heat” (1953) concerned Mafia domination of city government and escalated the levels of brutality and violence. Afterward, movies like "Rogue Cop" (1954) about a corrupt cop (Robert Taylor) would follow in the wake of "The Big Heat."

As a tough-talking, two-fisted, homicide police sergeant bent on revenge, Glenn Ford's Sergeant David Bannion in Fritz Lang's superlative thriller "The Big Heat" served as a kind of prototype for Clint Eastwood's "Dirty Harry" character. This seminal saga about police corruption and metropolitan crime syndicates in the fictional town of Kenport appears a little dated by today's standards with its obvious studio sets and Charles Lang's crisp black and white cinematography, but it still packs a wallop. "Mystery Street" scenarist Sidney Boehm based his screenplay on William P. McGivern's Saturday Evening Post serial. Before veteran cop Tom Duncan commits suicide, he leaves a written record of his corrupt dealings with big-time hoodlum Mike Lagana (an urbane Alexander Scourby of "Seven Thieves") for the district attorney. Duncan's greedy wife wants the payoffs to continue, however, so she blackmails Lagana for $500 a week. Sergeant Dave Bannion finds himself assigned to the case. "When a cop kills himself, they want a full report," he says to a fellow policeman at the scene of the suicide. Bannion generates a lot of hostility in getting that "full report" not only among the paranoid criminal figures but also with his superiors some of whom may or may not be on the take.

Everything comes to a head one evening when Bannion and his pretty wife Katie (Marlon's older sister Jocelyn Brando of "Ten Wanted Men") are bound for a movie. Katie commandeers their car while Dave tells their young daughter Joyce (Linda Bennett of "Creature with the Atomic Brain") a bedtime story. She is going to drive off to pick up the babysitter. Unfortunately, Katie never gets out of their driveway because several sticks of dynamite attached to the ignition explode and kill her when she starts the car. Of course, the criminals expected Dave to die in the explosion. Dave survives and sends his daughter off to live with some friends while he starts smashing heads. Mike Lagana isn't any too happy about this error. Meanwhile, Dave's superiors turn up the heat on him to cool off, but he refuses to and quits the force to take care of business. Along the way, he crosses paths with a dame, Debby Marsh (Oscar winner Gloria Grahame of "The Bad and the Beautiful"), and they chat in his motel room. Word reaches Debby's thuggish boyfriend, Vince Stone (up and coming Lee Marvin of "The Dirty Dozen") and he takes his rage out on his girl by splashing her face with scalding coffee. Earlier, Stone burned a bar girl, Doris (Carolyn Jones of TV's "The Addams Family"), with his cigarette and attracted Dave's interest.

Later, Dave has harsh words with Lagana, and our hero is forced to leave the force to complete his investigation. Dave and Debby become unlikely friends, and he confides in Debby that everything will blow up in Lagana's face if the wife of the dead cop were to release his death note. Debby visits Bertha Duncan (Jeanette Nolan of "Tribute to a Bad Man") and she has an interesting dialogue exchange with her about being 'sisters in mink' before she guns her down in cold blood as a favor to Dave. Actually, Dave turns into a rogue himself and he isn't much different from the scum that he wants to put away for the murder of his innocent, defenseless wife. Women fare horribly in "The Big Heat." Indeed, all of the women involved in the plot, with the exception of Doris, wind up dead by fade-out. . Altogether, “The Big Heat” resembles a film noir thriller, but Lang and Boehm violate one of its chief tenets. Instead of women destroying men, the opposite occurs. Bannion, who is warned by a colleague about his “hate binge,” winds up destroying four women, including his wife, in his crusade for justice.

Lang directs "The Big Heat" without any pretensions, and it is better for this treatment. He never wears out his welcome at 90 crisp, no-nonsense minutes. The coffee burning incident happens off camera. We see Marvin grab a boiling pot of coffee and Graham screams. Later, Graham returns the favor, but this time the action occurs in a semi-darkened room and we see liquid flying across a room like a serpent lashing out. The only complaint of mine is that we don't visually see Lagana suffer as a result of Bannion's investigation. Although Bannion has banished chaos and restored order by the last scene when his new superiors reinstate him, the cost has been catastrophic. Indeed, in Lang’s sadistic mise-en-scene, the hero must wipe out virtually everything—sometimes even his loved one—before peace can be regained.

Representative of several film reviews that appeared during the initial showings of "The Big Heat" is Robert Kass' review in "Catholic World: "The present vogue for sadism and violence reaches some kind of apex in "The Big Heat," a truly gruesome crime thriller in which a detective-sergeant singlehandedly battles corruption in city government controlled by a ruthless racketeer." Later, Kass adds for effect: "I wonder that someone hasn't protested about the frightening display of viciousness which must have an even greater impact on young minds. Apparently, though, sadism is not considered on a par with sex."