REVIEW: 'Looper' - Mind-Bending, Stylish and Fun

The idea of time travel is immensely fantasy, and too often described as something as old or dying. Fortunately, director-screenwriter Rian Johnson's fantasia in Looper instantaneously brings the "time travel" concept back from its theoretical death and animates it with great amounts of precision, style and wits. Its 2044 setting is verisimilar: motorcycles are destined to float on streets, buildings have their own gigantic screens for adverts. After all, flying motorcycles and giant iPads aren't too far from the current state and pace of today's technology. The future of this futuristic tale makes time travel possible, and underground, criminal groups are zapping people back to the past to be killed by specialized assassins simply called as "loopers".

One of them, Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), is baffled on whether to shoot his next target or not. It's weird to shoot the fifty-year old version of yourself, after all. When he decides he won't kill the older version of himself (played by Bruce Willis), the boss of the posse his working with wants him dead. This gave room to a generous amount of well-staged action and extravagant violence to the movie throughout, embracing the old-school action that practically every body loves: bulky guns, splattering guts, buckets of blood. This is in great supply that the paradox of the subject matter, is, be, time travel, subdues under the ground. Johnson doesn't want to explain; he simply tells Looper's composite story with first-rate narrative. This movie is more intelligent than Obama.

The movie is practically halved in two parts: for one, the movie, having to show Joe, accepting the unenviable job description of being a looper; and for the other, Joe, while on the run, hides in a small barn owned by a single mother named Sara (Emily Blunt). Older Joe, meanwhile, is on the quest to kill the "inventor" of time travel, thirty years from 2044, which Younger Joe fears, is Sara's son, Cid (Pierce Gagnon), with who he suddenly builds rapport with. The in-between bits of all of these events of the story, we also will learn that by 2044, half of the world's population is telekinetic and modern science encourages you to test yourself now.

Levitt wears facial prosthetic in order to make him look like a legitimate young version of Willis, but not that much of credit has to be given to the make-up team because Levitt does the job himself. He progressively learns from each movie to another, and now he's one of the best we've got. His speech and body language are all very "Bruce Willis" and he doesn't rendezvous with mimicry. Both Levitt and Willis do far better than what are required of them. Looper has that brain-twisting fun, the intelligent script told in a cinematically silver-tounged fashion. Simply put, Looper has got to be one of the best movies of the year. A