Next Week on Looper

Rating: 4/10 (24 December 2012)

What horrible timing this movie had. Sure, even though it came out months before the Sandy Hook school shooting, it's still arriving on home video just weeks following the massacre.
Looper should have a warning, or at least, a tribute, if they keep with the December 31st release date. Spoiler: (and there might be a few more minor ones – fair warning,) there are scenes where a man hunts down to slaughter very young children. They even show a scene of a very young boy getting shot.
Sure, this was made months, perhaps a year, before the Connecticut shooting, but I believe it should be shelved for a bit longer.
I digress. My opinion of this 15-subplot film was that I was puzzled it wasn't actually another network 1-season failure on TV. It was amazing that they seemingly fit one Sci-Fi Action/Adventure Drama season of 24 episodes into 2 hours. Since they can do that, that gives me hope for a 24 movie, finally.
The movie was all over the place, since they, like I said, fit 2 dozen episodes into 2 hours. It starts off with one bland and clichéd future and speaks worse of another future. The plot holes are wide and before you get a chance to get hung up on those, it shifts to another movie. And another. And another.
Oh, and before you think: Well, at least we have our hero to attach onto throughout the multiples of ideas presented, think again. There's barely a character to latch onto. Everyone is an asshole and the only difference between the characters are levels of asshole'ness.
Let's see if I can come up with even a basic premise for this random movie: Young Joe shoots and kills future mob trash sent back in time because for some dumb reason, it's apparently harder to bury a body in the future than it is to travel through time.
Eventually every "Looper" must kill themselves, pending they lived long enough to see time travel invented. So, Joe knows he must kill old Joe, and despite what the misleading trailers of the film told us, he has no problem with this. He's just a bad shot, and old Joe gets away.
There. I gave you the first of about 14 more story lines to discover. That's the gist of what you'll really need to know. Well, that, and the blah (only in this performance, that I've seen) Joseph Gordon-Levitt either had a digitally re-mastered face to look like old Joe (Bruce Willis) or he's just damn good at squinting for weeks of shooting.
As mentioned, this might have worked as a one-two season Sci-Fi show on TV, and it might have been more interesting that way. We might have had more fleshed out characters that we would be more invested in. Perhaps, I wouldn't have thought they were all assholes, or actually believe them when they finally do the right thing.
Still, despite all I said, it kept my interest barely enough to complete the loop of the movie. It might be hard for those lost loved ones recently or still in shock of what happened on the East Coast, but other than that, it's a harmless, albeit below-average, flick.