Review of Looper (2012) by Tomas L — 26 Aug 2014

This film starts off with a certain sense of intrigue. After the narrator explains to you the context of the story, as an expectator you suddenly want to learn more about this not so distant future: people with telekinesis, time travelers, etc. It all sounds really fancy, but what surely gets people's attention are "the loops".

In the distant future there already is a way of travelling back in time, which is exploited by the mob to get rid of certain individuals, as murder seems to be almost an impossible task, taking into account how futuristic police can track down the murderers. And so the distant future mob sends these unlucky people back in time to be dispatched by the not-so-distant-future mobsters as if time machines were some sort of human garbage can. It's all good for the hitmen until they are made to "close the loop", that is, kill their future selves, which in turn will mean that if no time paradoxes are taken into account they will die the same way in the distant future. A plot so interesting that would make for a great movie if it did't have more holes than loops.

Some people find this movie confusing and refuse to search for the plot holes, but the sad truth is that the biggest holes are also the most simple, which leads me to think that surely the directors must have noticed these holes, but just hoped that people would be to confused to even pay attention to the plot details. For example:

PLOT HOLE 1: The whole reason of these "loops" is the murder of people from the future, because actual murder is nearly impossible to acomplish ...right? But the reason future Joe (Bruce Willis) wants revenge is because his wife was murdered....right? But if the murderers where mobsters that were trying to send Bruce Willis to the past, because apparently it was less of a problem to send someone to the past that to murder him why did they kill his wife in the first place?? Couldn't they fit two people in the machine or something??

PLOT HOLE 2: Consider time machines are invented. Now consider they are illegal and consider a mob so powerful not to only own these illegal time machines, but also use them for the super-punished crime of murder. Surely these machines must be heavily regulated by the future police and surely in order to kill someone the mob must make an elaborate plan which involves possessing one of these machines. After considering this, I am sure we all would leave a time machine pretty much unguarded with an angry Bruce Willis about to go in for his execution....or maybe not..

PLOT HOLE 3: This film tries to tell us that a mob so powerful to get these "heavily regulated" machines cannot kill a single man (only Bruce Willis's wife), because smuggling a machine the size of a boat its piss easy, but hiding a corpse is not....Or is it? we don't even know anymore ....

PLOT HOLE 4: This film also tries to tell us that the future police are some kind of crime fighting supermen able to detect any murder anywhere and find the person guilty (again, not with Bruce Willis's wife). One would think that they are a very efficient work force with a lot of resources for fighting crime, but it turns out it only works with murder, you can kidnap someone and make him dissapear, the police won't give a damn.

And the list goes on, and on, an on....

And the list goes on, and on, and on....