Looper (2012)

 

By 2074, surveillance and tracking technology has made it almost impossible to dispose of bodies undetected.  Crime syndicates have found an elegant if implausible solution: they send their bound and gagged victims thirty years back in time to be executed there (and 'then') by hitmen known as "Loopers".

Being a Looper pays good money, but it comes with an in-built end date: either you died before 2074, or you'll be picked up and sent back to be executed by your younger self.  When this happens, it is always a Looper's final job, and it pays big.  Failing to follow through, on the other hand, costs big: you become an object lesson that ensures most Loopers follow through.

Joe is a 25-year-old looper whose final job hits a big snag: his future self isn't bound and gagged when he comes back through time, and that allows "Old Joe" to escape.  Now the younger version must hunt down the older one, while trying to stay ahead of the syndicate enforcers who are after his head.

That is, of course, all a lot easier said than done.

Looper is a solidly entertaining film.  The script mostly does a good job of avoiding what I call "time travel waffle": that is, the moment in a time travel movie where everything comes to a stop as they try to explain what can and can't be done with their version of time travel.  This film smartly has characters give just enough explanation of these rules to provide context to scenes and to justify certain plot developments, without letting those explanations bog down the plot's momentum.

The movie is also consistent in having things work in the way they are explained and also in having them play out by the same rules for multiple characters.  There's still some "wait, how does that work?" stuff to it, because 

This does not mean the script avoids paradox; it doesn't. It is a movie with time travel after all, and time travel by definition breaks the usual rules of cause and effect.  But I can at least say that once Looper says "this is how time travel breaks the rules of cause and effect", it sticks to what it has said.

Being a movie with time travel in it, Looper has more freedom - and thematic justification - for playing around with the order in which it portrays events.  It smartly uses that deal opportunity to structure itself in ways that keep the audience engaged with the story and unsure about what will happen next.

Or what will happen at the end, for that matter.  The movie followed a different narrative path than I expected it to, and reached a climax I had not anticipated.  I think I enjoyed it all the better because of that. While unexpected, the ending was appropriate, and - given other events leading up to that point - avoided some issues that I definitely would have had if they had gone with the more 'traditional' ending I was expecting.

So do I have any complaints about the film?  Well, just two, really.  I wish they'd given Emily Blunt more to do, and I do feel that the script (possibly unintentionally) presents the rather problematic sophistry that "If time travel is illegal, only the criminals will have time travel".  There are some unfortunate real world parallels there that should be obvious to most readers.