Grade B-: Looper is a movie that’s crammed with a few too many good ideas that all gets in the way of the telling of a streamlined story.
In Looper, it’s 30 years in the future where the mob from 30 years into that future uses time travel to send back people to be murdered in the past in order to eliminate the evidence. Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is one of many hit-man “loopers” who carries out hits for this future mob. Each of the loopers last hit is of killing the future version of themselves, thereby closing any time loops that they may have opened in carrying out these hits. But Joe screws his last hit up and can’t kill his future self (Bruce Willis) who goes on the run and decides that the only way to get his future life back is to find and kill “The Rainmaker,” a future mob boss who controls the world through terror and mass murder. Current Joe must try and stop future Joe from killing three children, one of which will grow up to become “The Rainmaker.”
And while the idea of something/one from the future traveling to the past to kill a child in order to change the future has been done before in the Terminator films, Looper does things differently enough and introduces enough new story elements to not be a copy. However, there are just too many of these new ideas to fit comfortably into one movie. There’s future vs. past self, the mob running everything, the idea that while you may try and change the future via the past you may instead be setting up those exact events you’re trying to stop, an sub-plot about telekinesis, the idea of China as the world’s only superpower…
If Looper had only been a bit simpler I think it would have been a more satisfying film.
