Not as Clever as You Think

Rating: 5/10 (7 January 2013)

I had remembered seeing previews for this and was pretty excited when it hit video last week. I wanted to like this film as I generally enjoy time travel flicks (even with all their inadequacies) and thought the whole contract killing idea was a neat framework. Sadly, it fell far below my expectations as an original take on time travel. Furthermore it didn't even deliver much in the way of excitement, suspense, or any outstanding performances. Somehow, Looper also managed to be devoid of any sort of style, preferring to lean on character development as it's main source of entertainment.
The premise is extremely interesting, but Joe turns out to be a pretty prototypical hit-man. Far too much time is spent on explaining who he is and what he does, and yet we end up knowing nothing about it except that he gets high and frequents prostitutes. His older self is just as bland; we know he was married. Both Joe and Old Joe aren't really given any real humanity and it made it hard for me to really care what happened because there was absolutely no connection made between the audience and our main character(s). Bruce Willis didn't even really need to be in this film as Old Joe didn't represent an emotional being at all.
When the film really gets going, with the TK boy, it still fails to impress. Little actual tension is created I didn't much care about the sort of stilted, clinically precise version of this young child that was presented. The mother was the only character able to generate any sympathy and only so far as I understand how protective a single parent feels over a child that age.
The big plot twist was the most disappointing aspect of the movie to me. While I know a lot of people out there are praising how well the time travel mechanic was handled and how it actually "makes sense" in this film, it's really nothing new to anyone who's even had a passing interest in time travel and read up on the many user-friendly, math free theoretical plausibility and possibilities of time travel. What Looper does in order to have the film "make sense" on a superficial level is introduce a closed loop. An interesting facet proposed about time travel is that if it is possible, then time isn't really changed; if someone traveled back in time then that's actually what happened back then.
For instance if I traveled back to 1981 and had coffee with your 20 year old self, then now you would see a picture of me and remember having coffee with me 32 years ago just as I look now. It always happened that way. Where this gets tricky is when you have a "closed loop," as it's called in time travel parlance. (No real relation to the "closing your loop" term used in the film, although perhaps a bit of foreshadowing.) A closed loop is when an event in the past causes an event in the future that goes back in time and causes the initial event in the past. Sure, it's a clever little device to throw into a film, but it makes no more sense than any other time travel paradox. To put the concept in simpler terms, imagine that I have a book of all of Shakespeare's work. I have this because he wrote it hundreds of years ago. But lets say I go back in time, before he wrote anything, and took this book with me. Now let's say I give him this volume and tell him to do what he wants with it, and I return to my present time. What we have here is all of Shakespeare's work that has no origin. I only have it because he wrote it, and he only wrote it because I had it to give him, he had it because I gave it to him. It's cyclical, and because of the laws of conservation of matter and energy, it is impossible for this to exist without a point of origin. If my dad gives me a knife in 2010, I go back in time and give it to him in 1990 for him to give me in 2010, then the knife is never actually created.
The fact is that it's impossible to try and be sensible about time travel. By virtue of being impossible (as we know of) it is also incomprehensible and incompatible with our view of time. Therefore I think the best a film can aspire to is to be entertaining. Looper tries too hard to be a time travel movie for the thinking man, but it falls on the same problems as other movies of the type and fails to genuinely entertain in the process.