Image your a low level lowlife working for the Mob. Only you live about twenty years in the future. About thirty years after that, time travel will be invented and the only people who will use it are Mobsters. Instead of doing something cool with the tech, like say, going back in time and stealing all of Hitler’s artwork or beating Sutter to Sutter’s Mill, the Mob sends back people they don’t like so they can be killed in the past. This is where you come in, your a Looper and you kill people and get rid of their bodies in the past.
Looper tells the story of one such person, who ends up having to kill himself to Close The Loop and end his contract with the Mob. His future self is not too happy about this and goes on a Terminator style killing spree-hunting down the future crime boss so he will never get a chance to order the hit.
There’s a lot of chasing, a lot of shooting, and a lot of bloody gore. There’s also a lot of rather dry and boring talk about one thing or another. Like all time travel movies, we need to turn off our brains while we watch Looper, becasue if you think about it, it makes no damned sense at all.
Somewhere near the start we see our hero, such as he is, killing people and dumping their bodies into some kind of furnace running under an abandoned building. OK, why doesn’t the Mob just zap the people they want killed into the furnace directly and cut out the middle man? Or to the bottom of the ocean? Or the surface of the Moon?
Then there is movie’s most interesting/disturbing scene, where a Looper lets himself escape. So now we have two copies of the same lowlife running around, a young one and an old one. The young one is captures and we watch the old one as scar messages appear on his skin, and then body parts vanish one by one. He finally reaches the address he was given, where he begs to be killed as there is less and less of his body left for him to move. We see this, but our hero doesn’t see it. Still, he does the same thing later, giving his older self a message in the form of scars.
The implication is that outright killing the younger Looper is a Bad Thing-as Doc Brown would say. Maiming the younger Looper doesn’t seem to do much to the Time Space Continuum. Which bring up a much greater question about the shocking ending to Looper-why is this corner of the Milky Way Galaxy still intact?
The super villain in the story, The Rainmaker, is a powerful PSI, so much more powerful than your average PSI that he seems to have an ability from a lot farther down the time line. Was The Rainmaker sent back from the future?
Looper was an ok movie to watch. I like the actors, the special effects, and time travel. But like a lot of movie, it just made no damned sense at all.
