Weirdly inconsistent time travel laws

Rating: 5/10 (21 July 2018)

First of all, there was some attempt to make an original time travel film here. Secondly, it was well-acted by everyone in the cast, including the child actors. Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt were great choices for the hardened, older and brash, younger versions of the same man. It is well scored, and well directed. Sadly, this cannot save a film that has a hastily written plot just to make a time travel film.
The central premise of the film, that in the future time travel is used to send people back in time to be assassinated because it is impossible to dispose of bodies, is immediately flawed when you realise they could just send the dead body back in time and directly into a furnace, cutting out the middleman. This is particularly of note when we see gangsters actually kill a civilian in the future, indicating they're more than happy to do the deed just to keep their operations silent and that they more than likely kill just as many in the future as they send back. So again, why bother with time travel, especially seeing as the film emphasises that time travel is especially illegal?!
The actual mechanisms of time travel seem to be as confused as the reasons for it as well. It spends a lot of time setting up that when someone travels into the past, changes to the past only catch up with them once they pass the point when the change physically occurs. There is one scene making this gruesomely clear, in which a young looper is dismembered as his older self falls apart on the street outside. This is later reinforced with Bruce Willis' memories. This raises another fundamental question with the plot: why did the Rainmaker rise to power on account of his rough upbringing before Bruce Willis travelled back in time to cause his rough upbringing? In Willis' future, he shot his older self as a young man and never went near the farm, meaning the Rainmaker would not exist, at least not as a hardened criminal. He would have no one to stop upon travelling to the past, and would not have even had his loop closed since the Rainmaker was the one closing the loops. As a side note on the same topic, why did he vanish when Gordon-Levitt shot himself? As established earlier, he should have simply turned into a corpse!
These weren't the only two issues I had with the plot, but they were the two that really crippled it for me. The earlier throwaway line about telekinesis seemed like forced foreshadowing in hindsight, but at least didn't create plot holes. There were other issues, but I've already written too much! 5/10