Fabulous and fantastic and flawed deep down, but enjoyable!

Rating: 7/10 (15 February 2014)

Looper (2012)
A futurist romp with time travel, double and triple identities, and hot rod punk culture where everything is more like a beat up 1980 than a real 2044. The whole scene, though, and the plot, is fun, dramatic, compelling.
And confusing, for sure. I think it does mostly makes rational sense (there are some things that will never make sense with time travel, so don't think too hard) and it will help a viewer to know that the whole movie is set in 2044 (as far as I could tell—not including brief flashbacks for backstory).
You'll wonder about whether Bruce Willis really looks like an older Joseph Gordon-Levitt (even with a prosthetic nose). This matters quite a bit—in fact the movie needs a level of credibility all around. The weakest point, I suppose, thinking back on how it feels a day later, is that it was all fun and wild and dramatic and if you left it out there just for the thrill and the mind-bending, you'd be happy. But the rules of reality and time travel were really so loose, almost gratuitous, you had to take each huge twist as just the liberty of the director/writer Rian Johnson.
And this left me a little disengaged. I mean, I was fully watching trying to keep up with it, so there was that kind of engagement. But in terms of the characters and their real dilemmas of how to stay alive (or not), I was forced to just go with the flow. The story was "told" to me.
It's worth saying that there are echoes of Terminator here—the idea of going back in time to change the future, and even the idea of finding a future leader as a child. This movie is less futuristic—more on that in a sec—and more romanticized. Where Terminator pushed the idea of the robot to an unlikely level that we could at least envision, this movie tips into telekinesis at key moments, and it's a huge stretch—pure fantasy fiction. Not my personal thing.
As for the way the future is depicted? "Looper" might not seem low budget with such an ambitious plot and famous cast. But it cut every corner possible to make us work very hard to believe this hyper future was really just sustained by a bunch of old American cars and trucks with tubes attached to their fuel tanks. That's the best they could do? Terminator went into a very high tech militarized future, which was fair enough, but what about "Minority Report" or "Blade Runner" or "Brazil" as a whole range of options that actually felt like the future?
Maybe these things don't matter as much to you. And maybe you don't mind a plot with lots of logical holes. Either way, go for this one. It's actually "great" on many levels. I really liked it!