Bruce Willis

Lay the Favorite: purported to be a comedy

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What a disappointment.  Lay the Favorite, opening this weekend, sports a fine director, Stephen Frears (The Queen, High Fidelity, The Snapper), and a promising cast (Bruce Willis, Rebecca Hall, Catherine Zeta-Jones, John Carroll Lynch).  But the story fails, and it’s just not funny.

Willis plays a Vegas sports gambler who apprentices a naive young thing (Hall).  They face the ups and downs of sports betting, his embittered wife, a welching better (Lynch) and a sleazeball bookie (Vince Vaughan).  Nothing in the story rings true.  Rebecca Hall, so good as the classy smart girl in Vicky Christina Barcelona, plays Florida trailer trash – even wearing Daisy Dukes throughout the whole movie – and it just doesn’t work.  Worse, Vince Vaughan takes his usual wild man to an even more manic level, which falls flat.

Skip it.

Looper: thinking person’s sci fi

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I liked Looper because it’s old school sci fi – based on an idea, in this case, what happens if humans learn how to time travel?  I think that much of the sci fi in that past thirty years hasn’t been idea-based, but more an excuse to clothe a monster movie or an action movie in cool-looking sci fi settings.  The credit here goes to writer-director Rian Johnson who has imagined a 2044 in which the richest 10% (including organized criminals) live pretty well, but the rest of us vie for scraps in decayed cities that haven’t seen any investment since maybe 2012.  In Johnson’s foul future, time travel is discovered, but by 2074, is used by criminals to dispose of their victims back in 2044.

In Looper, 2044 hit man Joseph Gordon-Levitt is confronted with the 2074 version of himself, played by Bruce Willis.  Willis is on a mission to do something in 2044 that will change an outcome in 2074.  The mission is shocking – would you murder a child to prevent him from growing up to become a Hitler-like monster?

In a year with many excellent performances by child actors, Pierce Gagnon plays one compellingly terrifying four-year-old.   As a bonus, one of my favorite character actors, Garret Dillahunt (No Country for Old Men, Assassination of Jesse James, Winter’s Bone) has a nice turn near the end of the movie.

As Looper climaxes, the audience needs to think along – if history is altered, how will the dominoes fall?