One of the better movies of the sci-fi genre.

Rating: 9/10 (7 October 2012)

This is a great sci-fi movie. It's about an assassin, called a looper, who is hired to kill people sent to the past from the future. If this seems confusing, it is, and that's intentional. The problem is: what happens when the victim sent back is the assassin? That means killing yourself, or, as it's put in the movie, "closing the loop." Nice euphemism, right? Anyway, this one particular assassin is set to kill his next victim when he notices that the victim is himself, just older. Well, needless to say, but say it I will, mayhem breaks lose, because in the world of the loopers, if you don't do your job, then you have to be eliminated. (Eliminated: that's another euphemism.) You may be wondering: why have loopers? The answer to that question is because this story is set in the not so far distant future, after some kind of major upheaval, leaving humanity wrecked and presenting a perfect opportunity for organized crime to flourish. In the future time travel is discovered, but it's illegal, which means, of course, that only criminals use it. But in the future, when the syndicate eliminates someone, they cannot dispose of the body, hence, they transport the victim to the past for processing. Okay, now that we got that muddled explanation out of the way, here's what happens in the movie: the looper is now searching for his older self because his older self wants to murder a child who, in the future, will be the head of the crime syndicate who gets the older looper-self's wife murdered. That's right: it's a vendetta. Now, the younger looper-self learns that the child, a boy, lives on a farm with a woman who is the sister of the boy's mother. Now, the boy's mother was killed after the boy unleashed telekinetic forces that smashed everything in its path. Oh, before I forget, I need to mention that after the cataclysmic events that messes up the world, about ten percent of the population comes down with a mutation that gives them telekinetic powers which nobody knows how to use. Okay, now back to the looper and the boy. The looper finds the boy and they form an emotional bond. Finally, to bring this synopsis to an end, the older-looper-self arrives at the farm, and is trying to kill the boy, who has just unleashed a humongous telekinetic blast, but instead kills the sister-mother, and so the looper kills himself. The reason why the looper kills himself is because he realizes that by sacrificing his life, he will save the life of the mother and that in turn will change the course of history because instead of the boy growing up bitter and unloved, and becoming the head of the criminal syndicate in the future, he will have a mother to care for him. Thus, the looper becomes a martyr and a hero. This movie is saturated with violence because the story is violent. Bruce Willis is fabulous as the older-looper-self. He carries this movie; it's probably his best role and performance in years. The story itself is intriguing and clever, and the movie does an excellent job of telling a story without an over-reliance on special effects, which are kept to a minimum.