Pure excellence in film making.

Rating: 10/10 (19 December 2012)

May contain spoilers. - Finally, a movie that attempts, and succeeds, to bring a different sort of plot to the table.

The year is 2044 and there are a group of people called "Loopers". These people are assassins, but in an interesting twist, they do not assassinate people in their time. Instead, in the future is a mob syndicate which has access to time travel. They send their "marks" back in time to this 2044 period and these "Loopers" are waiting to dispose of the targets quickly. Strapped to the back of the marks are silver plates which are used as currency.
The twist is that every so often a mobster decides to "close the loop". This means they send the assassin's future self back to 2044 to be disposed of by their past self. They can not know it is them because every mark is hooded and one of the stipulations is that you do not remove this hood. Only when they remove the jacket and find gold plates instead of silver do they know that some time in the future their loop has been "closed".
I really can not believe this movie is getting such terrible reviews from some. After seeing it, this movie immediately made it into my top ten. It kept me engaged and on the edge of my seat the entire time. It was a fresh idea, with a lot of fresh new faces in the Hollywood scene (aside from Bruce Willis, who to me took a back seat in this movie).
Joseph-Gordon Levitt to me played his role amazingly with top notch acting and a true believability. What was nice to me was to see Paul Dano getting a much larger role where he truly gets to allow his acting skills to shine (I'm hoping this role launches him into stronger ones in the future). Emily Blunt did very well in her portrayal of "The Rain Maker's" mother.
Some people say that a lot of the scenes were left without being tied up, but to me I believe that every part which had you questioning what was going on was very neatly tied up in an ending which even I could not guess was going to happen.
Speaking of which: SUPERB ending. It absolutely blew me away and I actually had to rewind it three times to watch again. It simply did not register with me that this was actually how it ended, but in a good way. I spent a lot of the film trying to guess how it would end, but how it really ended just hit me from left field. It was excellent.
I think people are giving this movie bad reviews because the cast are not multi-million dollar actors. Really though, if you want to see a movie that takes science fiction, film noir, suspense, crime, and action, as well as the perfect mix of drama to combine them into one, this film is it.