Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Bruce Willis, Bruce Willis plays himself.
Once you have this sorted in your head you can start watching the Looper.
The Looper is a tragically confusing mix of too many genres. Take horror, science-fiction, romance and buddy movie. Too much.
As much as I love both actors plus Emily Blunt (who NB has made most unfortunate script decisions recently), this film turned out to be a disappointment.
In 2044 – before time travel has been invented, there is a dirty business going on. Contract killers called loopers shoot death sentenced sent from the future. Time and place is known where they land. The only thing is to pull the trigger without thinking. The body will be loaded with silver bars – as your dough. If the bars are gold – that means you just killed yourself and your career is finished. You get exactly 30 years ahead of you. You just closed the loop.
A futuristic setup in its vision brings to mind Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner straightaway. The future is urbanised, humans are selfish and extremely divided in a caste-like system.
Joe’s (can you think of a better name for an everyman?) old self is late for the execution and then appears without a headscarf and looks back at him.
With the above setup many things can go wrong, can go various ways – this can be a good story.
The flaws involve too many gaps in the plot. I don’t know how Joe manages to sit in the same scene twice if time travel hasn’t been invented. As far as I get the idea and the convention of the genre, there are too many elements that just do not fit the usual logics of a futuristic vision.
There should be certain rules, right? The mere concept of being able to speak to your older self is fair enough but then this story falls over into pieces on so many levels.
As always mending the future by time travel into the past is tricky as every step does change what you end up with. But this is just unsuccessful. On the verge of boring and too many threads are unexplained, illogical and at times gory for no particular reason. Very disappointing.