More Clever Stupidity

Rating: 3/10 (22 October 2013)

There are plenty of reviews on the IMDb website that document the ridiculousness of the time travel paradoxes as explored in Looper. This review will not dwell on those inconsistencies. Instead, there are a couple of scenes that really point out how cleverly stupid this film is.
At the end of Looper Bruce Willis has been captured. They know he is dangerous. So what do they do? Put a bag over his head. This works very conveniently to effect Bruce's escape...sort of. Bruce body slams people, whirls his arm backward and snatches a henchman's gun and shoots him dead with one shot. If Bruce had been bound he could not have escaped in this manner. That would have been smart for someone handling a dangerous criminal to do. It is very convenient as always that henchmen are completely stupid.
Now...how does he know exactly where to grab to wrest the gun free to shoot the henchman? Did he have X-Ray vision in the back of his head? Because I sure know that I could not have pulled that move off. Then again, I am not Bruce Willis.
So...immediately the requisite group of more henchman show up to kill Bruce. What does Bruce do? He grabs the exceptionally conveniently placed super machine guns that just happen to be laying in the room and he mercilessly mows everyone down because Bruce is the only person with the super machine guns with magazines that never empty.
After killing everyone Bruce goes to kill the 5 year old Rainmaker. And how...pray tell...does Bruce go about doing this? He has traveled from the future and fought through hell to get to this point slaughtering people along the way. He knows the Rainmaker has "magic powers." After all this bloody hell Bruce shows up with...what is essentially...a pea shooter! He just slaughtered 50 people with super machine guns (and also hand grenade bombs) and he is going to kill the magic powered one and he shows up with essentially a 6 chamber handgun (that, in Hollywood fashion, can shoot as many shots as possible).
It is so clever it is stupid. Bruce has done all this and he knows the kid is bad news so he shows up and starts shooting from 50 yards away. No attempt to ambush the little kid with magic powers! No attempt to get close to the target before shooting! Nope! This is just more really conveniently illogical writing and film making.
So...the Rainmaker kid starts his Exorcist possession routine of making everything float. Now...somehow...while his Mother and Bruce magically float in the air as well as blades of grass...the Rainmaker creates a dust storm to knock down the vehicle at the road running beside the field they are in. Yet...despite the appearance of the tornadic storm...there is NO DUST ANYWHERE! The dust magically disappears and the camera views of everyone and everything are clear as a bell. How bleeping convenient!
So...Bruce is shooting...and he is wearing a blood soaked shirt which shows the battle he has been through some mega miles away from the farm. Bruce is in such a hurry to kill the Rainmaker he not only traded all his high tech weaponry for a pea shooter...he didn't bother to get a change of shirt! I don't know about you but when I am wearing a shirt soaked in blood and I have a minimum one hour long drive ahead of me...I'll find a shirt somewhere!
So...Bruce grazes the cheek of the Rainmaker which causes the Exorcist effect. Now, the bullet went across the cheek and conveniently opens a cut. During the whole next scene...the cut never bleeds. Oh, Rainmaker has blood caked on and in the vision scene Rainmaker has hopped a railroad car and is nursing a bleeding cheek...but the kids cheek never bleeds at all. Just a minor continuity error.
The people who made Looper thought they were so clever constructing this silliness. This film is filled with these cleverness constructs from start to finish. Their cleverness is their downfall. They were so clever they couldn't see the stupidity they were making.