Review: Looper

       Time travel movies are notoriously hard to write. Sure, it's possible to just write the story so that you can go back in time to make everything right, like in Superman. However, this technique is considered cheap and is generally derided by fans and critics. The other problem with time travel stories is dealing with the issues and paradoxes backwards time travel causes. There's the issue of deciding whether what happened in the past happened and cannot be changed, or if it's possible to change the past. If the past can't be changed, then what's the point of time travel, and if it can be changed, the writers have to be careful in preventing paradoxes. Looper cleverly writes it's way out of all of these problems. It doesn't get into the details of how time travel works, and while it appears that the past can be changed, because the mechanism of time travel is unclear paradoxes don't occur. In the end, writer and director Rian Johnson breaks the rules of time travel movies whenever he wants and follows them whenever the story needs them. It makes for a very clever time travel movie that puts the story before anything else.

       Looper stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Joe, a type of hitman called a “looper.” In Joe's time, time travel has yet to be discovered. However, in thirty years it has been, but it is illegal and only used by criminal organizations. The mob sends the people they want dead back in time, where Joe and others like him kill them and dispose of the body. It's the perfect system. There's no body in the future to be found, and the loopers receive payment that is attached to vests worn by their targets. However, when the mob wants to end their contract with a looper, they track down the future version of the looper, send him back in time where he is killed by his younger self. This is called closing the loop. Usually, the person being killed is wearing a bag over their head, so the looper doesn't know that they've killed themselves until they see the gold bars attached to their targets back. However, when Joe's older version of himself (played by Bruce Willis) is sent back he isn't wearing a hood, which causes young Joe to pause and that gives old Joe a chance to escape. After escaping, old Joe goes on a mission to find the young version of the future crime boss, known only as “The Rainmaker.” The Rainmaker has decided to close all the loops, so old Joe reasons that if he can kill the Rainmaker before his rise to power, he won't be sent back in time in the first place and he will live out the rest of his life with his wife. Young Joe can't let old Joe escape because letting your loop run, as it's called, is very bad and is grounds to get killed by the mob in the present, which is run by Jeff Daniels, a man from the future. Young Joe loses old Joe in a field, and finds himself on a farm where a woman (Emily Blunt) living by herself is raising a young child. Of course, the child turns out to be the Rainmaker and young Joe decides to wait on the farm knowing that soon enough old Joe will come to kill the kid.

       As I said before, this film is a clever time travel movie. Unfortunately, this movie tries to be more than just a time travel movie. The movie flirts with the concept of superhuman abilities, and it's really unnecessary and isn't handled nearly as well as the concept of time travel. I wish everything related to telekinesis was left out of this film, because it simply overcomplicated everything and was borderline absurd. Joseph Godon-Levitt does a fantastic Bruce Willis impression throughout the movie, but they really didn't need to give him prosthetics to make him look more Willis, they frankly were pretty distracting, and as a moviegoer I'm able to suspend disbelief and think that Gordon-Levitt will look like Willis in thirty years. Bruce Willis is as cool as he's been in years. He is still as able to perform action sequences as he was more than twenty years ago. There were also some neat scenes between him and Levitt where he is lecturing his younger self on the mistakes of his own past, something that most of us would do if we were to meet our younger selves. I really wanted the two lead actors to spend more time together on screen. They spend much of the second act apart from each other and that part of the film drags a bit as a result. In the end, I would say that this is a worthwhile film, not without it's faults, but definitely showing the promise of young director Rian Johnson.