The first time I heard from Looper, it was when I saw pictures of the iconic weapon of the movie, the blunderbuss. I fell in love with the aesthetics of the prop, and decided to check the movie out sometime, and it kinda fell off to the pile of things I should do at some time.
Today, I decided to watch it, and boy, did I like it. It was awesome. Of course it did have it's little quirks that bothered me a bit, but I was able to ignore them(A thing I am rarely capable of).
Looper is situated in the near-future, where time travel is not yet invented, but soon it will, and it would be outlawed almost instantly. Mobs utilize time travelling by sending people they want dead into the past, because in the present it's supposedly next to impossible to dispose of a body. The story is set around Joe, who is a Looper, ie. a guy who kills people sent from the future. They are called Loopers, because when the cops in the future get too close to sniffing out the mobs' operation, the mobs will send the old looper from the future to be killed by the young looper, to "close the loop". As a compensation, Lopers are extremely well paid, but I think anyone can already see where this movie's plot is going. Which is surprisingly not a bad thing.
I love how the time travel effects are not told, but shown, sometimes very graphicly, with a person literally losing limbs as his young version is being mutilated. The movie also brings out a new view about the moral questions concerning time travel, and made me look at it from a whole new angle.
The first thing that bugs me about the movie is the way it starts. There's a short opening scene(nothing wrong with that) followed by monologue. There's pretty much nothing that separates the viewer from the movie better than monologue. Although I do admit that the movie's premise wouldn't have worked without the monologuing, so it's more or less a lesser evil. Things flow logically, with the "Old Joe" knowing things, well, because he's old, and the dynamics of the old and young Joe work very believeably. Both the old and young Joe moved and behaved in similar fashion, the young Joe even has Bruce Willis' (old Joe) grin!
The plot, although overall good, did have a few almost Chekov's gun characters, like the stripper girl with her son. Giving her a name and a story was redundant in my opinion, and only served in confusing the viewer(me), as I initially though that Sara was the working girl.
The story was pretty straightforward with almost nothing surprising about it. What surprises me most is th love story it's not, and how there's no definitive main character or villain, actually. The plot plays very nicely with the time travel elemnt, and for once I can actually say that they got it right. The continuity is there. The biggest story-wise question for me is the "TK-powers", which are not explained it at all, just handwaved along. There could have been so much potential to toy with with it. There's basically nothing explained about the future, or "The rainmaker", which leaves holes in the timeline.(Possibility for a sequel? Although I don't see this movie as a series, not sure if I would want a sequel)
In short, Looper was a good action movie, which I can recommend, ad I propably will watch again some day. And I definitely will be building myself that blunderbuss. I want it.
