Looper – An Instant Time Travel Classic

**** 1/2 out of *****

Running time: 118 minutes

MPAA rating: R for strong violence, language, some sexuality/nudity and drug content

Intriguing, exciting and intellectually challenging, Looper is a sharply-executed blend of action thriller, character drama and science fiction fantasy.

Predominantly set in a dystopian future America of 2044, the story also skips forward and backward through time. It tells the story of a professional assassin (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a “looper,” who works for a crime boss from the year 2072. The looper’s job is to kill his boss’s enemies from the future, eliminating them in the split-second they arrive in back 2044.

But while our hero, like all the other assassins working in his present, seem untroubled by their avocation, they all face the same doom.

For their richly-rewarded lifestyle has a built-in time limit imposed upon it. Each lives with the certain knowledge that their careers will come to an abrupt end one day, when they will be obliged to kill themselves.

They won’t have to end their lives in the usual sense of suicide, however. Working within the topsy-turvy world of time travel, each looper who survives his term in the present and who lives into the future will be sent back to face certain death at the hands of his younger self, precisely 30 years after each one began his career.

Heady stuff, and, if you follow the logic, a bending of time like a moebius strip, flowing back into itself.

But wait for it… that’s the least complex plotline in the film. There’s much more going on, but to give any of it away will spoil all the surprises which await you.

Suffice it to say that there are thrills (and laughs) aplenty to be found, as Gordon-Levitt’s future self, Bruce Willis, attempts to change the rules by surviving his trip back to 2044. And there are other serious sub-plots brewing as well, with what-ifs galore when alternative paths are revealed for several of the film’s characters.