"This time travel crap, just fries your brain like a egg..."

Rating: 8/10 (14 July 2014)

There are any number of reasons time travel stories can make your head hurt. This film had a Young Joe, an Old Joe and a Dead Joe. Dead Joe was the narrator. See what I mean?
Well I liked the concept of this picture, but to say that there were numerous inconsistencies in the execution would be an understatement. For example, when Abe's (Jeff Daniels) gat men eventually found and finished off Seth (Paul Dano), his on the run future self began losing body parts and became disfigured. But when Young Joe killed himself at the end, Future Joe disappeared. Why the two different treatments for what should have been the same outcome?
I guess you shouldn't force yourself to think about these things too much. If you just accept the flow of the story as it occurs, then it's a fairly entertaining sci-fi/action thriller. Still, if you think there ought to be some credibility built into the premise for a time travel flick, you'll only wind up discombobulated here. Like why would anyone agree to become a looper if your life span in retirement was guaranteed to max out at thirty years?
Here's an interesting thing though. The first time I saw this movie was shortly after I caught an Encore presentation of a film titled "Kid Blue". I tried to figure out if there was any connection to the character in this film, portrayed by Noah Segen, with Dennis Hopper's portrayal in the 1973 Western. The only thing I could come up with was that Dennis Hopper was an outlaw too, but as you might expect, in the future they had bigger guns.