MoeJackson

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Won’t Back Down is an unfortunate movie: it’s the kind of movie with a good heart and a good message with equally good intentions . . . but which is horribly, terribly handled and ends up being little more than the average movie of the week circa 1992. We have the main character of Jamie Fitzpatrick (Maggie Gyllenhaal) who is a single mom working two jobs too busy to give much attention to her dyslexic grade-school aged daughter. Eventually, things become so intolerable for her child in school that she is compelled to join forces with a teacher named Nona (Viola Davis) to break the school from the clutches of an uncaring and indifferent bureaucracy that puts profits and teacher union rights ahead of children and their education. How noble.

It is noble. Really. But the movie is played with such “I-Believe-The-Chidlren-Are-Our-Future” cheesy earnestness that you begin to roll your eyes every time Ms. Gyllenhaal happens upon the scene to give yet another soap box speech about mothers and daughters or tell off another smarmy teacher who tries to dismiss her child as “challenged”. Gyllenhaal gives such an over-the-top and loud performance you can’t help but wonder what her aim was: perhaps she thought that if she yelled at the camera enough times she might get an Oscar nod? Meryl Streep was certainly loud and chewed up the scenery in Doubt. The difference is that character was supposed to be a virago. This one is caring mother whose decibels outweigh any real life attempt at negotiating the well-being of a child. Sorry, Maggie, this won’t be your Erin Brockovich.

Viola Davis is mercifully more restrained and gives a solid, dependable performance. The rest of the cast (which includes Holly Hunter and Rosie Perez) does its best with the material their given, though it doesn’t add up to as much as they would perhaps hope. If only director Daniel Barnz spent more time fleshing out all the characters instead of giving Maggie Gyllenhaal the lion’s share of scream time to roar.

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Bruce Willis in another movie? Yup, believe it or not, this is his sixth release of 2012. Luckily, this is one of the better ones, thanks to the performances by Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Emily Blunt who bring a freshness and (let’s just say it) youth that is usually missing from the standard Bruce Willis action flick. For an overt example of this, please watch The Expendables. (Actually, don’t: just take my word for it, it’s really bad).

This one is about an assassin named Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who works for “The Boss” (Jeff Daniels) who employs professional killers known as Loopers. Loopers are, in short, time traveling assassins who kill with a weapon known as the blunderbuss. The Looper travels through time with the victim, shoots the target, and then steps back into the future. No body to be found because it’s 30 years in the past. Brilliant, right? Sure, except when the targeted victim is the Looper himself. Ah ha!

That’s what happens when Joe encounters his future, older self (played by Bruce Willis) who has been sent into the past by a mob boss known only as “The Rainmaker” so that he can be executed by his younger self. It sounds confusing, and it kind of is, but it all quickly turns into a cat-and-mouse game when the two Joes team up and start running from the Mob. Needless to say, they don’t exactly like each other or think alike, even though they are the same person. And hat’s off to Gordon-Leviit for getting all of Willis’s trademark facial ticks and expressions down to a science.

Emily Blunt shows up halfway through as a Kansas mom who had a relationship with Joe. Did they have kids? I’m not entirely sure, because the movie offers a lot of parallel storylines that may or may not be true. In the end, it only adds to the confusion. But then, that’s part of the excitement. Looper isn’t the smartest action thriller you’ve seen, but it is definitely the most fun you’ll have at one this season. It also happens to be the best Bruce Willis movie to emerge since Moonrise Kingdom in which he also had a supporting part. I think his days as a leading man are officially over.