I’ve seen a lot of time travel movies before, and they usually boil down to “we have to stop some bad event that happened in the past so we can save our future, which is actually the present”. You have to suspend your disbelief a lot to believe in time travel, and you had to do it even more in Looper.

Looper is based on the belief that time travel is here, but it won’t be invented until 30 years later, which is the year 2074. For whatever reason, the mob owns the rights to time travel, which feels like I missed a very interesting futuristic Godfather movie here. Apparently, the mob hasn’t seen a lot of time travel movies, because they only use it to dispose of bodies. Seriously, you have access to a machine that can alter the fabric of reality itself, and you use it to dispose of bodies?

Yes, apparently, it is impossible to dispose of a body in the future. Why? Who the heck knows. Again, there is some futuristic film about tracking every people on Earth that I missed?

Anyway, hit-men in the year 2044 are asked to wait out in a field so their targets can be sent from the future to be killed in the past. Why in the world don’t they kill them before they sent them back? Again, who knows.

The hit men also know that one day, their future selves will be sent back just so they can kill them. This is called “closing the loop”, but occasionally, the future self escapes because the killer just can’t seem to kill himself. Does this make any sense? It’s nice to know that these hitmen have thirty years to live it up, and know when they are going to die.

Anyway, Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays the hit-man protagonist, who will apparently grow up to look like Bruce Willis. Since Willis knows what will happen in the next thirty years, he comes up with a plan to save the future from some crimelord who is simply known as “The Rainmaker”.

Willis has an idea of who “The Rainmaker” is, as he has narrowed it down to three kids. From here, the plot because a combination of The Terminator and every other time travel movie ever made. Remember how Arnold had to come to a house and ask “Is this the house of Sarah Connor?” It’s just like that, but with kids.

I’m not certain how much I want to spoil this film, but I will have to say that it is pretty spoiled. Looper is one of those films where new elements to the story are introduced, and instead of clarifying events in the film, they serve to confuse the viewer. This doesn’t mean that it doesn’t draw the viewer in, but the big payoff never really happens.