Too many ingredients in the narrative. 75%

Rating: 7/10 (10 October 2012)

Not a bad time travel story concerning executioners known as "loopers" who kill people sent back in time by criminals. The film is set in the future where, we are told, time travel has not yet been invented. Criminals in the 'loopers'' future need to 'dispose' of people from that future time by sending them back in time as people are so easily identified in the criminals' time that you can't have anonymous corpses then.
Of course, the executioners are well compensated for their work. Their biggest payday is earned when they execute their future selves! That is know as "closing the loop". They then have 30 years in which to live it up before...they get sent back in time to be eliminated (in order to cover the tracks of their future criminal employers). This, of course, brings many time travel paradoxes into play.
Whilst an interesting concept, the biggest drag on this movie is having another genre staple in the mix...telekinesis. Time travel is hard enough to get your head around but the addition of telekinesis strikes me as just naff. The movie could have been improved by tightening it (with the removal of that element).
The characters aren't particularly engaging either and they're not sympathetic for the most part. One looper - Joe - is the subject of the movie. His younger self is played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt and his older self is played by Bruce Willis (who has a superior time travel movie to his credit..."12 monkeys"...although his performance in that earlier movie wasn't what was good about it either).
Perhaps another detracting element from the film is the logic of time travel...the scenario as I outlined above seems to contradict scientific understanding of the limits of time travel. That understanding was best illustrated in the more brain hurting movie "Primer". I've reviewed that movie here and commented on it requiring flowcharts and notes to keep tabs on what is happening. "Looper" does pretend to be that complicated (Old Joe mentions the pitfalls of discussing time travel) but isn't. So, aside from seeming to portray an impossible form of time travel, it also seems to become incoherent in other ways too. When Joe has to "close the loop" on one occasion, the movie does seem to lapse into "Groundhog day" territory (a terrific comedy with some overlapping ideas) but then becomes confusing. I'm guessing that's because of bad story telling rather than any problems with the notion of time travel itself. That scene seems either inooherent or misleading.
Anyway, I did like the ending to this movie...even though I'm not sure it followed its own internal logic of what time travel entails!
Recommendations:
12 monkeys
Primer. You really do need a flowchart and a notepad to keep up!
Groundhog day