Several models who had similar plastic surgery have died under mysterious
circumstances. The police think the deaths are suspicious enough to assign
the case to the homicide division, but their one and only suspect is the women's common
plastic surgeon. In typical movie fashion, the beleaguered doctor (Albert
Finney) decides to abandon his medical practice temporarily in order to solve the crime himself. He
manages to pull off a series of capers which which would impress James Bond,
including reckless car chases which endanger the city, shoot-outs with
automatic weapons, high-tech gizmos, stolen access codes, and disguises. In addition to his unlikely quest to
expose the real killers, he also takes it upon himself to protect the one
remaining model who falls into the same category as the dead girls. While he
is conducting his investigation, he consistently fails to keep the police
apprised of important clues and also fails to tell them that he is going to
be the constant companion of the next potential victim. He doesn't even tell
the police of her existence!
It's irritating that the baddies, armed with all sorts of futuristic
technology, are unable to dispose of one flabby little old plastic surgeon. Bad guy Tim Rossovich, a former NFL player, should be able to dispose of Albert Finney
with his bare lands, let alone with a perception-altering light gun. Albert
Finney is not a very athletic guy, and he looked downright puny in the
action sequences. Yet Rossovich fails to kill Finney repeatedly despite
having him outgunned and also having paralyzed him several times with the
hypnotic weapon.
Far more irritating is the fact that the film never offers any
explanation of why the models were killed in the first place! Once it
establishes a premise for the doctor's Mission Implausible, it goes off in a
completely different direction. Since it becomes an "evil corporation"
movie, I suppose the company killed the girls just because it was (summon
Richard Burton's ghost to say ... ) eee-villlll!
The editing of the narrative is so choppy that the film seems to be a
shortened version of a far longer work. I don't know that to be the case
since there are no deleted scenes on the DVD, but it is a reasonable
assumption based on such matters as these:
(1) The surgeon's partner is introduced as a possible red herring killer
- even says he's going to date the girls after Finney operates on them, but
he never appears again after the opening scenes. This is particularly
confusing since the police should have considered him the #1 suspect in the
murders, since his romantic proclivities would make him, not Finney, the
central link between the women. There had to have been some reason why that
character was introduced in the first place, but as the film stands he
serves absolutely no purpose other than confusion..
(2) There is one sequence that goes as follows: (a) On a Saturday night,
Finney is pinned down in his office by two guys with automatic weapons - all
seems bleak and hopeless for him. (b) With the camera on Finney as he cowers
beneath a sink, one of the off-camera guys says "to hell with him, we have
the girl," and the assailants simply leave, obviously having no interest in
killing him. (c) A word slide appears that says "Sunday." (d) Suddenly it is
daylight and Finney is in a car, being chased by the two men, whose interest
in killing him has apparently been restored. It seems quite clear that other
things must have happened between the beginning and ending of this sequence,
but the audience (unlike the doctor) is left in the dark.
(3) There is an undeveloped sub-plot about a presidential candidate who
will (presumably) use marketing and computer technology for the evil purpose
of winning elections. Vestiges of this thread pop up from time to time, but
without anything to tie them together. The candidate never appears except in
a video-within-the-film.
I wasn't the only one who was baffled by the editing. After I wrote the
words above, I read the NY Times review written by Vincent Canby, which
said, "The plot is pretty silly but Mr. Crichton's handling of it is even
sillier, though it is bold. When his characters get themselves into a tight
spot and, against your better judgment, you wonder how they'll get out, the
director just cuts to another scene in which the tight spot has been
forgotten. His chases have no climaxes. They simply end. Mr. Crichton has
fun sending up television commercials in one extended sequence, but his
direction of the rest of the film is so sloppy one suspects that if he
himself were a plastic surgeon, two ears might wind up on one side of the
same head."
I assume that all the missing pieces are on the cutting room floor. I
guess I could
listen to writer/director Michael Crichton's commentary to find out whether
I'm right, but the film is
just not significant enough to warrant such a time investment.
As Canby noted, the film has sequences which are quite enjoyable, but
they are comic rather than thrilling. There are some funny send-ups of
commercials, and the best scene is the final shoot-out. The action occurs
during a live demonstration video in which digital actors are being
superimposed on some sets. Finney and the bad guys wander in and out of the
sets, thus unintentionally and unknowingly interacting with the digital
actors in a video being broadcast to demonstrate new technologies to a hoity-toity group of
corporate fat cats. At one point, a dead and bloody Tim Rossovich is lying
on a breakfast table while a digital family discusses their Oat Bran. The
black-tie honchos and their wives are confused and shocked by what they see, and express their
reactions with stock black-and-white-era crowd dialogue like "Say, what's he
trying to pull?" Somebody apparently failed to tell the author that the
1930s had ended.
Looker does have a good cast (James Coburn plays Dr. Evil to
Albert Finney's Austin Powers), and it does have one element which makes the
film much more interesting now than it was 25 years ago. Unlike the typical
film about science-based paranoia, this one imagined most of the future
details quite accurately. For example, it predicted a day when live actors would
be replaced by their digitally-simulated counterparts to create more effective
product marketing. We can see many examples of this today, one recent one
being the creepy recent popcorn commercial which brings Orville Redenbacher
back to life. The script also posited a time when omnipresent computers would replace TVs
as the primary delivery vehicles for visual stimuli. That seems obvious
today, but was not in 1981 when the first PCs were basically used for word
processing and performing simple math. The future it imagined in 1981 is
very similar to the world in which we live, and that's interesting to
observe.
Crichton is on record as having said that he meant this entire film to be
funny - sort of a genre spoof. The plot and the action sequences are so bad
that could have been made that way on purpose, so perhaps Crichton is
telling the truth. I certainly hope so, because Looker does have a few
laughs, but is truly preposterous and annoying if viewed as a thriller.
