Looker

There are two kinds of vanity project movies. One is the most obvious kind: the self-insertion movie, where one person is the writer, director, and star, and the movie puts them in a highly idealized, coveted spot. Think The Room or On Deadly Ground or any Neil Breen movie. Then there's the other kind, where the creator isn't in the media, but it is undeniable that their involvement has installed a short ceiling on the project, because they can't divorce themselves enough from the material to see its flaws. Which is where Looker comes in. Looker is a Michael Crichton project -- written AND directed -- and if you've seen any movie based on his material or read his books, you'll know in an instant that this has his imprint all over it. His blending of sci-fi, horror, and action is part of it -- he loved to tell stories of "look at the horrors science can unleash if in the wrong hands!" -- but it's more than that. There's an undefinable imprint Crichton leaves on a story, in the same way you can spot a Stephen King story a mile off. This is neither a feature nor a bug; it's a function. Whether you vibe with it or not is what makes it good or bad. In Jurassic Park, it's very, very good. But Jurassic Park also had the benefit of having more than one writer besides Crichton, and a director to bring the script to life. Looker is all Crichton, and it shows, and that's not a compliment. Looker reeks of "only I can bring this vision to life" syndrome, because a competent director with no emotional connection to the script would've seen that the story is a convoluted mess of dead ends and plot holes. What starts off as a De Palma-esque erotic thriller (ugh, my Kryptonite) pivots into a weird science fiction story involving light-emitting catatonia guns, deepfake technology, mass hynosis via commercials, an evil tech company with nefarious plans for all this, and of course, only one man (a plastic surgeon) who gets sucked into the middle of it all and has to untangle the web. Looker's ideas are interesting, and it seems as if it wants to pose some philosophical questions for the audience to ponder. Questions about the nature of advertising, beauty standards, media manipulation (of and by), and the dark side of technology. But the script doesn't really ask those questions, not in the strictest sense. It uses them as plot points, saying "golly, [blank] really makes you think", and moves on. Looker doesn't want to engage with these themes, they're just ingredients in its genre soup. Crichton was far too interested in showing off what they could do with computers here, or his weird technology ideas, or spending two solid minutes of the movie's run time ogling Susan Dey's naked body from every angle. I'm serious, she stands on a rotating platform, and we see her naked over and over and over and over and over and over again. We get it, you had a crush on Laurie Partridge, Michael. We all did. Move on. This is some creepy, sexist, wish fulfillment disguised as movie-making. But what Looker lacks in a willingness to explore its ideas, it also lacks in an ability to tell a cohesive story. Looker doesn't just demand, it begs the audience not to think about it and just go for the ride, because the moment you do, it all falls apart. Here's an off-the-top-of-my-head list of some of the plot holes I found: What is the end goal of the evil tech company? What is the purpose of the hypnosis gun? Why have hypnosis technology in both gun form and embedded in commercials? If the gun works on massive pulses of light (that, depending on the scene, are either narrowly focused like bullets or spread out like spider webs), why are the commercials using tiny blue dots? Why kill the three models before Susan Dey? If the evil tech company had come to the conclusion their plan with the models was a failure, and they had recalibrated said plan, why have Susan Dey's character go through the same highly specific plastic surgery anyway? If the failure of the original plan was "they're looking at the models and not the product" in the commercials, why would you want to spend money on surgery to make the models even more aesthetically pleasing? How do none of the people at the tech company realize they're standing on the set of the CGI commercials in the movie's climax? Why is there an anti-hypnosis gun weapon introduced but never used? Why, when Albert Finner goes to the apartment of the third victim and the cops don't buy his alibi, does he not point out that there are eyewitnesses that can corroborate what he said? What is the significance of Finney's missing button? Why is it said the evil tech company stole Finney's pen, when it's found right on the floor in his office? Again, that's just what I could pull from memory. I'm sure there's more if I would've been more analytical and taken notes, but Looker doesn't deserve that kind of time spent on it. Looker shows a movie that its creator held far too dearly to see the crippling flaws contained therein. Albert Finney tries to hold it together, but he's not the action star this movie needed, and as charming as Susan Dey is, she comes off far too wholesome and naive for her role. There is a good idea in here somewhere, but this was not the medium to explore it, and Critchton was not the skipper to guide the ship through it.