The year is 2044. It’s thirty years before the invention of time travel. A voiceover tells us that as soon as time travel is invented, it’s outlawed. Naturally, that won’t stop the most powerful crime syndicates from using it. So where’s Timecop when you need him?
Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a looper. Loopers are hitmen, but not the type who whack you in Scorsese movies. No, loopers simply wait in a field for a target to appear from the future. When the target arrives, hooded and bound, the looper shoots him. The only benefit of doing it this way is the body won’t be found in the future, when cops have access to higher tech forensic methods.
Before disposing of the body, the looper can find their payment strapped beneath the target’s clothes. The payment usually comes in the form of silver bars, which can be traded for their own timeline’s currency. Every looper knows full well that, one day, they’ll find gold bars strapped to a body instead of silver. The day that happens, the looper has just retired himself, which is so common it’s called “completing the loop.” When we see that Joe lives very well in a future where most live in squalor, we can see the attraction of the job despite its deadly retirement plan. He even admits that people in his line of work aren’t exactly forward-thinkers.
If you’ve seen the trailer, you already know that when Joe’s future self is sent back, young Joe fails to retire him. His future self is played by Bruce Willis, which is far less distracting than having Gordon-Levitt play dual roles—one in old-age makeup. You’re probably expecting a cat-and-mouse game to ensue. It’s actually more like a cat-mouse-dog-and-tiger game in which timelines tangle like pasta.
Does this sound convoluted to you? It’s a movie about time travel—of course it’s convoluted. Whereas so many of these movies try to make an unbelievable premise believable with endless technobabble, Looper leans into the problems of time travel with little explanation, which gives it room to do something fresh in the genre. Its interpretation of the rules leads to one of the most chilling death scenes ever filmed. The scene in question is truly the stuff of nightmares, but if you want to poke holes in it, you’re watching the wrong movie.
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