Looker (1981)

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Before he began to work for Spielberg and co and got caught up in the Hollywood machine,Crichton was really an auteur,whose works have strong connections between them."Mondwest" "Coma" and "Looker" deal with the same subject:distrust or disgust of technology,heroes trying to find what lies beneath.These three works display two worlds which coexist ,the second thriving in the shadow of the "real" one.We have James Brolin and Richard Benjamin leaving their routine nine-to-five life for a fake far-west(Mondwest);Geneviève Bujold ,far from her comforting hospital ,pacing up and down the ominous Jefferson Institute (Coma).Albert Finney,(Doctor Robert)hip cosmetic surgeon,closing his office to investigate in the unsettling building of "Digital Matrix inc." That said,"looker" is not as strong as the two previous works (I put aside "the first grain train robbery " which is a different matter):one can go as far as to write it's merely some kind of repetition of what came before:the Jefferson Institute and Digital Matrix inc. play the same part in "coma" and "looker";and there's more:Leigh Taylor -Young 's part in the latter recalls Elizabeth Ashley's in the former:same spooky smile,same frightening coolness.You can compare James Coburn and Richard Widmark as well ."Coma" wins hands down though:its directing is much more mastered,the camera wonderfully used the corridors of the hospital,and the huge room full of dead bodies in the institute; it lacks vigor,intensity,which makes it look like a made-for-TV movie.There are excellent ideas particularly when Coburn says that nobody forces you to watch TV,and however most of the American people spend 20% of their time in front of their set.We might see commercials differently next time we're confronted to a spate of this mind-destroying drivel.But suspense is very weak -in "Coma" it was almost constant- and Albert Finney was not perhaps the good choice :a good Hercule Poirot( who works with his gray cells),he's too listless in this active part."Looker" is worth a look anyway.

Spoilers within.I just watched this again and it occurred to me that it still works in 2007. If anything the premise is even more believable now than it was 26 years ago. In that sense it was a pretty darn accurate bit of future prediction in terms of where our video and computer technology was going.I've always liked this movie. It stands as a classic underrated film and a fond memory of my childhood. I took two points off though, one for each of the two problems I have with it: First, they didn't provide enough motivation or explanation for killing the models. One of them seemed to have figured out what was really going on, so that makes sense. But the others? Was it just to avoid paying out their contracts? They made a point of saying how rich the RI company was, so the cost would seem to be trivial in comparison to murder.Second, it struck me as odd that they could accurately digitize human beings but they still shot the commercials on a real set. That doesn't make a lot of sense. Even today it's much easier to model a kitchen than it is to model a human being.Overall though it's still a solid and enjoyable flick. You could make this movie today and it would be a perfectly good film for 2007.

Not awful. Michael Crichton's techo-thriller has a lot of great ideas floating around, but few are really fleshed out enough to make for a really good movie. Albert Finney plays a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon who stumbles upon a plot to kill off models (many of whom were his patients). The trail leads to a conglomerate run by oily James Coburn and his sexy goon Leigh Taylor Young. What he uncovers is a pretty clever plot to replace the models with computer generated replicas, thus allowing them to work forever without aging or getting paid. Unfortunately, the leaden pacing of the movie does it in. Finney seems surprisingly engaged, but Crichton has directed nothing. In fact, his direction here (as it was with COMA) is so without personality it has a deadening affect on everything. Coburn is fine in an all too brief role and Susan Dey is terrific as one of Finney's luckier patients.

I remember seeing LOOKER in the theater and several times on TV years later. It no longer runs anywhere, and I was not aware it was available on video. Albert Finney is always worth a look, even in this pseudo-scientific potboiler about models being murdered and a mysterious corporation that may be behind the killings. It's a Michael Crichton novel written in the style of Robin Cook's COMA, so be prepared. Actually, COMA is a better film. But it's like WOLFEN,a Whitley Schreiber story about intelligent wolves loose in New York city. The movie is a dud except for Finney's presence. Hell, Finney even kept the fantasy flick BIG FISH interesting, and that's saying something indeed. If you want to see Finney in a really competent thriller, watch the made-for-TV THE GREEN MAN. It is a great ghost yarn, strictly intended for an adult audience.