Looper
Tags: boring, neo noir, murder, suspenseful, psychological, paranormal, mystery, violence, alternate reality, flashback, clever, tragedy, revenge, sci-fi

Plot synopsis:
In 2044, the United States has suffered economic collapse, causing severe social decay and growth in organized crime. In addition, a strange mutation has occurred in 10% of the population, giving them minor telekinetic powers, manifested by their ability to float small objects. They are referred to as TKs. Thirty years into the future in 2074, time travel is invented, but is immediately outlawed. However, because by that point tracking technology has rendered it nearly impossible to dispose of bodies secretly, crime bosses turn to time travel to send their targets to the past (the movie's present) to be killed by "loopers": hired guns paid in silver to kill whoever is sent to them. The victims have bags over their heads, and silver bars strapped to their backs. This comes at a price: The severe sanctions on time travel mean that crime bosses eventually need to end a looper's contract, and also eliminate any traces of their working relationship, so they send his older version back to be killed by his younger self, referred to as "closing the loop", which each looper must do himself. They're paid in gold for this, to live the rest of their lives in comfort.Joseph "Joe" Simmons (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), 25, works for a mafia company in Kansas City as a looper. Joe's boss, Abe (Jeff Daniels), was sent back in time to manage the loopers and also owns a club where Joe frequents and spends time with Suzie (Piper Perabo), a showgirl. Abe also controls the "Gat Men," his muscle, led by Kid Blue (Noah Segan). Gat men are so named for their magnum revolvers, which have greater range and accuracy than a looper's 'blunderbuss' shotgun; a weapon designed strictly for close quarters.While at the club one evening, another looper announces that he has just closed his loop. The big payoff in gold is reason to party. As Joe continues his work, he and the other loopers begin to notice that loops are being closed at an increasing pace.One night, Seth (Paul Dano), Joe's friend and a fellow looper, visits him in a panic telling him that he was supposed to close his own loop but couldn't do it. Seth reports that his victim appeared, singing a song his mother had sung to him when he was a baby. Knowing it was his future self, Seth couldn't kill him. Old Seth tells Seth about a new crime boss called the Rainmaker, who has commenced a reign of terror in the future. The Gat Men then knock on Joe's door, so he hides Seth in his apartment floor safe. The Gat Men suspect Joe is shielding Seth, so they take him in to Abe.Abe makes a deal with Joe. If he gives up Seth, he will walk free. If he doesn't, he can't be killed, as it will upset things in the future, but they can definitely make things difficult for him by taking half of the silver he has been hoarding for his retirement in France. Joe immediately gives up Seth. Abe suggests Joe go to China instead of France. "Don't go to France. Go to China. I'm from the future. I know these things."Old Seth attempts to climb a barb-wire fence, but notices old scars appearing on his arm, spelling out words telling him to go to an address. He ignores this, and one of his fingers disappears. Shortly after, another finger is gone. The stubs are not bloody - as if the digits were removed many years earlier. Then the tip of his nose is cut off. Old Seth returns to his car, and heads for the address he was given. Running toward it, he loses a foot, then apparently both feet, and he falls to the ground and crawls to the door. He bangs on the door, and it is opened by Kid Blue, who immediately shoots him. Behind the shooter, we can see Young Seth, alive on a table where they were chopping off his body parts, and we hear the sound of a ventilator.Joe continues to do killings. After each killing, he visits a diner, and works on his French lessons. He is served by a waitress named Beatrix (Tracie Thoms). While waiting to do one killing, he is puzzled when the victim is late. When the person does appear, he has no bag over his head. Joe recognizes Old Joe (Bruce Willis) as his older self, and tries to shoot him. Old Joe spins around, and uses the gold on his back to deflect the bullet. He grabs a gold bar and throws it at Joe, then knocks him out with a punch.Joe comes to, and finds a note, telling him to get out of town. Instead, Joe returns to his apartment, where he finds the Gat Men searching it and removing his silver. He traps Kid Blue in his floor safe, but is winged by another Gat Man, falls from his fire escape and blacks out.Flashbacks explain this chain of events: Joe closes his loop, and moves to Shanghai per Abe's advice. We step quickly through the next 30 years, and see Joe has a good retirement. However, his continued drug use eats through his funds quickly, and he must continue working with local crime gangs to make ends meet. Until he meets a beautiful, caring woman who helps him get sober. He marries her and settles down. Life is good until the end of the 30 years, when he is grabbed, and prepared to be sent back to be killed. He manages to slip his wrist restraints, get his hood off, and kill his attackers. He then jumps into the time machine. We see the previous events unfold, and watch Old Joe escape in Joe's truck. He buys all the first aid supplies he can find, and heads to Joe's apartment. Old Joe sees Young Joe fall from the balcony and land on a car. He rescues him, and disappears again.Old Joe looks up some cryptic numbers at the library, when letters begin to form on his hand and arm spelling out "Beatrix." Old Joe meets Young Joe at the diner. They order identical meals. Old Joe asks Joe how his French lessons are going, then says in French: "I know you have a gun under the table pointed at me." When Young Joe doesn't understand, Old Joe says "It's okay that you didn't get all that. You will." As Old Joe says, he's glad he learned the language. Old Joe tells Joe more about the Rainmaker: he appeared out of nowhere, and single-handedly took control of all the major crime syndicates within six months. He's responsible for mass executions and vagrant purgings, and he ordered the closing of all loops. The syndicate men killed Old Joe's wife by accident when Old Joe was captured. Shortly before this, Old Dale (one of Joe's looper colleagues) gave Old Joe a numerical sequence that hints at finding the rainmaker. Old Joe knows that in Joe's present, the child who will grow up to become the Rainmaker is living in the same county. If Old Joe can kill the Rainmaker, then he never would be captured, and his wife would still be alive. All that is known about the Rainmaker is that he has a synthetic jaw, and he watched his mother being killed.They tussle when Old Joe realizes that Young Joe still plans to kill him. Both Joes notice that the diner has cleared out. Staff and customers have disappeared. Suddenly, Gat Men burst in. Old Joe gives Joe a piece of a map with an address marked and a string of digits, and tells him that the Rainmaker may live there. Young Joe and the Gat Men shoot at Old Joe as he runs off. Then the Gat Men start shooting at Young Joe, who also runs off.Young Joe follows the coordinates to a farmhouse owned by Sara (Emily Blunt), who lives with her son Cid (Pierce Gagnon). When Joe shows Sara the map, Sara recognizes the digits as Cid's birthday and the serial number of the hospital where he was born, prompting Young Joe to explain the situation about the Rainmaker. Sara proves to know a lot about loopers and how they work. The database Old Joe used with the string of digits produced three possible children born on the same day in the same hospital, and he is intent on killing them.Sara tells Cid to stay away from Joe, but Cid is curious. He befriends Joe, and shows him some of the electronics gear he is playing with. Cid builds transmitters so Joe and Sara can signal each other. Joe is very impressed with the advanced work the five-year-old is doing.Old Joe tracks down one of the potential Rainmaker children heading to a birthday party. He kills him, but when he realizes he is still existing in his past, he breaks down crying. He has killed the wrong child. He then heads to the other child's place, but is hesitant when he realizes it is where his girlfriend, Suzie, from 30 years earlier is living with her son. Instead of killing the child right away, he watches their apartment.As Young Joe and Sara become close, he learns that she is a telekinetic with slightly more power than the other TKs, and that Cid was raised by Sara's sister for two years until she was somehow killed. Cid thinks Sara's sister was his mother, and does not believe that Sara is his real mother. Sara is shown to be frightened of Cid, running to her room and hiding in a safe when Cid gets angry at her in his belief that she's lying about being his mother.The next day, one of the Gat Men, Jesse (Garret Dillahunt), comes looking for Joe. Cid helps him escape, and Jesse leaves. While Cid and Joe are alone hiding from Jesse, Joe tells him how his own mother gave him to The Panhandlers, so that he grew up without her, a moment later saying that she sold him and that she used drugs. We see how being motherless led Joe to become a killer and a drug user. Jesse is suspicious of Sara, and returns, holding Sara at gunpoint when Joe comes down the stairs. As Joe tries to reason with Jesse, Cid starts to come down the stairs. Startled by Jesse, Cid falls down the stairs and goes into a rage. He lets out a massive telekinetic blast, killing Jesse. Jesse's blood "rains" out of his chest, implying how the Rainmaker's name was coined. Cid's extraordinary telekinetic abilities confirm to Joe that Cid is the Rainmaker, and that Sara's sister was killed by Cid when he lost control of his powers. Joe finds Cid in the sugarcane fields, crying, and comforts him. Sara helps Joe realize that this boy needs love, and may not turn into the Rainmaker if he is raised in a loving home.Meanwhile, Kid Blue has tracked Old Joe to Suzie's apartment, and captures him when he breaks inside to kill the child.Young Joe tells Sara and Cid to flee, surmising that his employers and/or Old Joe will target the farm. Old Joe breaks free, killing Abe and all the Gat Men except for Kid Blue, who is shot in the foot. As the two Joes confront each other near Sara's house, Kid Blue attacks and is killed by Young Joe.Sara and Cid attempt to drive away, but Old Joe starts shooting at their truck. Cid wants Sara to stop the truck so they don't come closer, but instead, Sara steps on the gas, hoping to run Old Joe over. Getting scared, Cid uses his TK powers to cause the truck to flip. He and Sara attempt to run to the sugar cane field to hide. Old Joe attempts to shoot them and the bullet grazes Cid's cheek. Cid goes into another rage and uses a blast of his TK powers to suspend Sara and Old Joe in the air. Joe has been following after Old Joe in his truck, which is knocked over by the TK blast. Sara calms Cid, telling him repeatedly that she loves him and he'll be okay. Cid calms down and ends his TK storm. Sara hugs Cid, and he calls her 'Mom' for the first time, showing Joe that Cid can be controlled. Recovering, Old Joe grabs his gun, ready to shoot Cid. Sara sends Cid into the cane fields and uses her body as a shield, preventing Old Joe from shooting. Finally, Old Joe shoots Sara through the heart. Cid sees his mother die, then escapes through the sugar cane fields and onto a slowly passing freight train. Flashback to a moment before the shot was fired: Young Joe understands that by shooting Sara and wounding Cid, Old Joe creates the embittered child who will become the Rainmaker without his mother's love, and also realizes that even by killing Old Joe, the loop will not be closed and Old Joe will keep coming back. So Young Joe turns his gun on himself. He pulls the trigger and dies, thus closing the loop circuit from his end. Almost instantly, Old Joe disappears.Sara lovingly puts Cid to bed after bandaging up the cut on his face caused by Old Joe's shot. Sara then goes back out to the sugar field and notices that the ground around the overturned truck is strewn with gold bars, which Old Joe looted from Abe's headquarters. She and Cid will now be well provided for. She walks over to Young Joe's body lying in the field, and takes a moment to stroke his hair, something that he had confided to Suzie that his own mother used to do for him.

Review: I think its fair to say that Joseph Gordon-Levitt is well on his way to being "one to watch", Bruce Willis pops back to life here, clearly enjoying himself again, (although i wouldn't say this is solely a Bruce Willis movie in that definition).This is a brilliant movie experience, its an wholly original and entertaining idea, that the writer/director has managed to successfully transpose to film without, it would appear to a layman, pressure or interference from external sources.No matter how much of a good time you will have watching this film (and you will), Hollywood could stand to learn much more from it..
Standing out amongst this years crop of mostly underwhelming sequels and comic book adaptations, Looper thunders onto the screen, showing, much like Inception did two years ago, that there is a place in 2012 for fresh material and just how good it can be when it's done right.The film tells the story of Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a hit-man for an organised crime syndicate tasked with assassinating targets sent from the future.
However there is much more to the story than the basic premise, and Johnson isn't afraid to keep details close to his chest until later in the film than most movies of this type, so I won't spoil them here.While certainly paying subtle homage to its predecessors, Looper is a stunningly original sci-fi masterpiece, vastly superior to any of the higher profile action releases this year.
Delivering excitement sprinkled with thoughtful themes of personal sacrifice, he offers us much to chew on.Johnson understands that a successful action film doesn't need an explosion every ten minutes, and allows ample time for developing character and story, something which will likely divide audiences.
Looper is very deliberately constructed, and after the highly charged opening establishing the intricate time-travel premise and direction of the plot, Johnson scales back the action almost too much as he ambitiously juggles the many and varied story elements he has created.
Looper is a film that goes to extraordinary lengths to leave every base covered in its quest to avoid plot holes and inconsistencies and in my mind it deals with the problems associated with time travel very well.
It is a dense plot which explores several different ideas and concepts both personal and scientific.As well as confidently dealing with a complex script which would have been very easy to either make too complicated or too full of holes, Writer/Director Rian Johnson (Brick) also creates a very believable future and fills it with people and events which feel plausible.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt wears heavy makeup and prosthetics to make him look more like Bruce Willis and although this is occasionally a little distracting, it looks unnervingly good at times, especially closer up which is odd.
He and Gordon-Levitt have some funny and tense scenes together which work very well.Overall there was little I didn't like about Looper and it has gone straight into my Top 10 films of the year so far as well as being probably my favourite Sci-Fi since 2009's Moon.
And as a huge fan I can see how since you're doing a movie/story about something that doesn't exist, or something we don't understand, of course there will be some plot holes and always ask, "why didn't he do this" or, "why couldn't they do that" or "he could've just done this" but being a film with only so much time to tell this unique story I think it did a great job with it.
How the director makes Joseph Levitt's character act like Bruce Willis and either Rian or Joseph does a great job depicting it, it's as if I was listening and watching Bruce Willis most of the film.
the film goes to extra length to make the story plausible and solid and the actors, including the 'rainmaker' child, did a marvelous job of pulling it off.i've always believed that the soul of any film, even as i appreciate great plot twists and great special fx and great acting and direction (yeah, i said great too many times!), is the message and/or portrait it intends to get across.
Except when looper Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) stares down the barrel at a version of himself that is thirty years older, Old Joe (Bruce Willis) outsmarts him and so begins a cat and mouse chase where there are multiples of each species and most of them aren't called Joe.Confused?
No, it's not as intelligent a film as Inception, but it kicks the ass of Wanted and Gordon-Levitt is potentially a bigger star in the making than either Leonardo DiCaprio or James McAvoy.I'm not sure that I buy Gordon-Levitt as a young Willis but the transition is simple and effectively executed and it needn't stand in the way of a couple of hours of great entertainment.
Maybe you'll absolutely hate the confusion it causes you, but if you don't mind giving a film some real thought and you enjoyed the possibilities of Inception, then Looper is for you.Just don't think too hard.
When the young Joe saw the Old Joe standing there, he hesitated and the plot clashed.The story was very confusing at first, but the movie does a good job to explain to us as it goes along.
Time travel sci-fi movies are inherently intriguing to me, so when I first saw the trailer with THIS cast, I knew I wanted to see it.As in the trailer, Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Joe, a specialized assassin, in an outfit called the Loopers.
That is, until one did, and that target happens to be his older self, in the form of Bruce Willis.Now, before the action begins in full throttle, Director Rian Johnson sets up the story by introducing the Looper doing their jobs and how these junkies hit-men spend their lives in a dystopian future (is there any other kind in the movies??).
"Loopers are well paid, they lead a good life..." Joe said in his narration, but what he means by 'good' doesn't mean a happy one and it's clear that Joe is disillusioned with his life.Let me just say the less you know about the plot the better as I went in pretty much 'blind,' other than seeing the trailer weeks ago, and it's fun to see the story unravel in ways I didn't really expect.
There's really a lot to chew on here, as do most time-travel movies, and I have to admit it was a bit mind-boggling to digest it all as I'm watching it, but now that I've processed the movie more, Johnson actually told the story well enough without an overly drawn-out exposition.The strengths are in the performances, especially Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who seems to only get better and better as he grows to be a force to be reckoned with in Hollywood.
The climax scene at the end of the film is a good example of how people do not know how to end a film and then come up with some "smart twist" which of course destroyed the whole logic of the story...It has been a while since I watched a decent science fiction, Looper is another mess, similar to Prometheus.
Unfortunately, neither of these plots are well executed and so it ruins the whole movie.The climax defies all logics and the time travel has big a goof up and you end up thinking, how can the director can be so stupid!
Time travel is always a risky subject, there have been some fantastic ones and there have been some very bad ones, this is one of those.It has all the pretense of being an edge of the seat sci-fi thriller, but then proceeds to bore you to death, and continually tries to pull on heart strings without having earned the right.The acting is OK Emily and Jason are fine (but did they not read the script?), Bruce is just there to drive the plot and hold a machine gun, possibly they should have cast someone else for the role, we want more from him, but we don't get it.
I realize now that maybe that was the whole trick.All I knew was, Joseph Gordon-Lewitt turned down a role in Tarantino's upcoming feature 'Django Unchained' to play the younger version of Bruce Willis in this action-packed time- travel flick that has them facing each other.
There are two different plots and the plot is weak, the acting performance is good, and the film is well realized but please the story not make any sense at all, is just a bad story about time travel mixed with some action and super powers.If you think a little bit the movie shouldn't even exist hahaha, because the broke all the physics law and is not logical at all.Please writers next time study a little more about common sense..
Written and directed by Rian Johnson, the writer/director of the under-appreciated "Brick", and starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis and Emily Blunt, "Looper" tells the story of a dystopian year 2044, where 10 percent of the population has developed laughable "super powers" that don't seem to go beyond levitating quarters and time travel has not yet been invented.
OK, I'll stop here only because I have undoubtedly confused you all by this point, even though there is so much more to this story I could get into, such as the aspect of futuristic drug use, important terminology such as "closing your loop" and how much makeup one would have to apply if their future self came back in time and looked like Bruce Willis.Levitt's notable transformation: The fact that Levitt and Willis' face look nothing alike, even with a heavy coat of makeup and prosthetics, isn't as distracting (or intriguing) as one would think.
And while the unavoidably over-dramatized and unintentionally funny scenes of this child having a fit, in slow motion, doesn't take away anything from this massively intriguing storyline, "Looper" is a perfect example of a film that would have been much more impactful as a book (if you know what I mean).Final Thought: Is "Looper" the greatest Sci-Fi movie of the year?
And so begins a sometimes interesting, though occasionally confusing chase/hunt as the younger Joe tries to zero in on his older self.On the plus side, this has lots of really good ideas and interesting concepts in it: the younger version of Joe can send messages to his older self by cutting his instructions in his flesh; memories are simultaneously created and rendered vague by the actions of the younger iteration; and in one scene another older Looper - who escaped death earlier - starts to literally fall apart as his younger version systematically loses limbs though surgery performed by the bad guys who are financing all the Loopers.
About half way throughFor a movie with such an intriguing premise, promising every manner of head spinning older assassin against his younger self interactions, along with the customary shootouts and all the ensuing paradoxes resulting from traveling through time, this takes an abrupt turn that is so left-field you'll feel you stumbled into a different movie It's almost like writer-director Rian Johnson ran out of plot after breezing through the first half and said: "Where else can I take this I know: a farm where  etc" This sudden turn is so out of sync, as to feel it doesn't belong in this movie.
Again, you wonder: why wasn't somebody standing at Johnson's typewriter with a cattle prod, telling him to come up with something better?There's a lot of inconsistencies too: without being overly specific, stuff is done in this movie that makes no sense when you think about it after wards (heck, even the central premise makes no sense – surely the criminals would be using time travel for something more ambitious than to just bump people off?).
Plot holes everywhere, story couldn't make up its mind about what it wanted to be, the future world was incredibly poorly realised and practically not even visible apart from insignificant, out-of-place elements such as hoverbikes and tiny, transparent cellphones.The worst of it all, however, is the complete idiocy of how time travel worked.
In 2044 Kansas, with time travel possible but illegal, former orphan-turned-assassin Joseph Gordon-Levitt inadvertently allows his time-jumping target to escape, only to learn the 'looper' is himself as a middle-aged man, back from the future to stop a notorious, telekinetic killer before he comes into power--and murders his beloved wife.
There was a good balance of action and drama and it was unpredictable enough to keep me on the edge of my seat.However, now I am home I am thinking more about what nonsense the end actually was, (yes, a time paradox) and worse than that I also realize there is not one character in the film I liked.
I find it hard to remember the last time I saw a movie with such mediocre wooden acting, boring plot (let's not talk about plot holes, shall we), artificial direction, such blunt plot devices (Bruce Willis character:"let's not talk about time travel because it will give us headache" - REALLY?!), such clichéd execution, and such a huge pretense.
After the disappointment that was "Prometheus" I was hoping the Sci-fi action genre would redeem itself with something more entertaining and intelligent.I'm not going to get into the faults in plot, as they've been recognized and pointed out by other reviewers in this forum: Like the idea of sending the bodies back to prehistoric times where the Rainmaker and his goons don't have to rely on, and pay hit men to dispose of the bodies.
It may have added some emotional meat to the story, but instead, a vacuous montage is served up, as director, Rian Johnson, deems the image of the wife extending her middle figure (flipping the bird), as enough characterization.Bruce Willis dueling submachine guns near the finale was trite, Piper Perabo's bare torso was nice (not sure what else her character was doing there), and the casting against type with Jeff Daniels as the bad guy was original, albeit a total miscast.
The catch is, the villains must knock off these loopers in 30 years to "close the loop".I found all of this rather confusing, and if most viewers are like me, they'll spend most of their time figuring out what's going on instead of enjoying the movie.Young Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt in swept-back hair, a fake nose and darkened eyebrows) is immensely rich because of his unusual profession.
While Joseph Gordon-Levitt is pretty enjoyable in any role, I felt like Bruce Willis was phoning it in and expected something more for such a highly-rated movie.
I love SF and time travel movies and I like Bruce Willis so I thought this might be a good movie to catch.
The story is so well written and put together and the whole time travel thing is very complicated as to make you think really hard and intrigue you, but not too much as to make you not understand the movie or plot.
and only very few exception actually worked and i can only think of "Terminator" the rest is just dull and rather silly than interesting, and in all of time travel movies the character has to meet his younger / older self and this should be the peak of the "drama" and this movie just falls into it exactly, i mean they just mention that 10% of the population can move things telepathically and they move along...just like that and we are suppose to buy it !!and you can't help not getting any sense of the future, i mean what did we see of that future ?
I think it does mostly makes rational sense (there are some things that will never make sense with time travel, so don't think too hard) and it will help a viewer to know that the whole movie is set in 2044 (as far as I could tell—not including brief flashbacks for backstory).You'll wonder about whether Bruce Willis really looks like an older Joseph Gordon-Levitt (even with a prosthetic nose).
It's not giving anything away to say that Looper involves time travel.The first 40 minutes of this movie are excellent with a convoluted story-line that makes you think whilst enjoying the swirling action.And then the lead characters come together in a diner.From here out the movie drops a couple of levels and becomes a generic action movie where one person is trying to get another person whilst another wants to stop him, along with the usual array of involved parties (mothers, mobsters, etc).
Young Joe (Gorden-Levitt) is a Looper and because Time Travel is as complicated as it is, a now Older Joe (same guy) (Bruce Willis) comes back from 2074.
I know that movies dealing with time travel CAN get confusing, but Looper just jumps around far too much, and if you're not paying attention to it right from the start you will get lost very easily, very quickly.The performances, however, are good, and Jeff Daniels actually plays a pretty decent mob boss.
I know that movies - especially ones like this - need wee "breaks" in them so you can catch your breath so to speak, but there were just far too many times where you thought "finally, it's picking up" for it to only just slow right down to a crawl again.Overall Looper is worth a watch - just - but in all honesty don't expect anything brilliant..
Also it's brutal just in the right way.Of course if you're serious about the time travel aspect, sometimes the time travel paradox doesn't seem to make awful lot of sense, but if you're just in it for an action thriller then you're going to be fine.One of the weirdest things in this movie is to see Joseph Gordon Levitt look like Bruce Willis.
The thing about Looper is that while it's a good action movie, watching it too many times doesn't make it good, unfortunately.
It is certainly a unique plot that differentiates itself from any other Sci-Fi movie, I found the scenes between Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis particularly interesting.