Looper (2012) Movie Review

It is Kansas in the year 2044 and we are told in the year 2074 time travel exists but is really illegal. We are also told that it is difficult to get rid of a body in the future so bodies are sent back to 2044 so people called loopers can dispose of them. When the services of these loopers are no longer needed, the future version of the same looper is sent back for the looper to kill therefore putting an expiration date on their life. In 2074 a mob boss known as ‘The Rainmaker’ is sending all the loopers back to get killed. More importantly he killed the movie’s protagonist, Joe’s wife. This means that Joe goes back in time to his earlier self to try and kill the child form of ‘The Rainmaker’.

My biggest problem that I found with this movie is that to enjoy it, you often have to turn a blind eye as to how time travel would truly work. While most movies require some suspension of disbelief, this is just out of the ordinary. You’ll find yourself asking questions like; why does that cloud look like a face and never move? Why does that guy only instantly start losing his fingers? And so on. While it did have a couple lines acknowledging this, it felt like a bit of a cop-out for Bruce Willis to just say, “It doesn’t work like that.”

For an action movie, the action was really pretty tame. There weren’t many action sequences in the movie and it really aggravated me that when Bruce Willis was beating people up those people were off screen. Some of the telekinetic stuff was pretty cool though. This also suffered from a lack of occurrences, which really watered down how impressive it was.

Other than this, everything else really hovers around mediocrity. The acting was okay; the dialogue was okay… everything was just okay. It would have been better had it invest a couple more scenes explaining how the time travel actually worked. It seemed to me like it was just: put Bruce Willis in a big toaster and… POOF, he’s back in time.

Looper provides an unnecessarily confusing story about time travel to the already overflowing mixing pot of time travel movies. The action is few and far between with the between being just okay. If you like sci-fi stuff I suppose Looper would be better than just sitting doing nothing. So yeah.