By Matt Duncan
Coastal View News
In 2044, time travel has not been invented yet. It won’t be
invented for another 30 years. That is what Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) says. And
Joe knows this because he is a looper. You see, when time travel is invented,
things go really badly. So time travel is outlawed. So, naturally, mobsters
find a way to use of the technology anyway. What they do is send people who
they want “taken care of” back in time to a place where someone—i.e., a
“looper”—is waiting with a loaded shotgun. That way the mob eliminates their
enemies without having to deal with any messy body situations.
Being a looper is a pretty good gig (that is, aside from the
murder, guilt, danger and all that). All you have to do is wait in a field at a
certain time, point the gun in a certain direction, and then pull the trigger
when someone appears. Then you dispose of the body. It’s pretty easy. Plus, loopers
get paid very handsomely.
There is a catch, though. When someone like Joe signs up to
be a looper, he agrees that after 30 years of livin’ large, he will go back in
time to be eliminated by his past self. No loose ends, you see. This is called
“closing the loop”.
Usually closing the loop is no big deal, but Joe’s case is a
bit different. This is what happens. Old Joe (Bruce Willis) appears in the
field, just as planned, and Young Joe kills him. So far, so good. Then Joe
lives his life, hits a few bumps in the road, ages, marries, cleans up, ages, and
seems pretty happy (we see all of this in a two-minute montage, so no spoiler
alert needed). But when it comes time for Old Joe to go back, he is not quite
ready to die. So, this time, Old Joe finds a way to dodge Young Joe’s bullet.
This puts Young Joe in hot water, since the mob does not
want two versions of the same looper running around creating havoc. So I guess
you could say that Joe isn’t doing himself any favors here. But Old Joe has a
plan. He wants to change the future (that is, his past) so that he does not
have to be sent back and killed. Young Joe, perhaps being a bit shortsighted,
just wants to finish the job by killing Old Joe so that he does not have to
face a bunch of angry mobsters.
Thus, Joe both wants to kill himself and to save himself. He
wants to change the future, but he also wants to preserve it.
“Looper” is full of good ideas. Going in, it had the
potential to be a really interesting, really mind-bending, really tightly
packed action film. It has a good story, a good director, good actors, etc. Indeed,
“Looper” has many potential virtues.
But here are a few of questions. Why wouldn’t the future
mobsters kill their victims first, and then, after that, send the bodies back
in time to be disposed of? Wouldn’t that be safer and easier? Or why not just
dispose of the bodies there in the future? I mean, c’mon, if these mobsters
have figured out how to time travel, why in the world can’t they figure out how
to get rid of dead bodies? And also, why do the loopers have to kill
themselves? Why not send a looper back to some other looper who will not
hesitate to finish the job? Again, wouldn’t that be safer and easier?
OK, maybe I am nitpicking. But in this kind of movie—the
kind of movie that is plot driven, where you suspect and hope that everything
is going to come together in a really nice, neat way—these kind of details
matter. That is why “Looper” is disappointing. It is full of
quasi-inconsistencies. These are the kind of inconsistencies that make you
wonder, if these characters are so smart and so clever, why is it that they are
doing such dumb things all the time.
“Looper” is a movie where you walk out of the theater trying
to figure out what just happened, and then you figure it out in like five
minutes and realize that the plot was not that interesting, that the story was
not that great, and that things maybe should have gone a lot differently.
That is not to say that “Looper” wasn’t fun to watch, of
course.
