I had real high hopes for Looper, which is why I was maybe a little disappointed by the whole thing. Willis was so excellent in that other time travel classic Twelve Monkeys, and the trailer looked like a straight up action feast with some badass time trave thrown in – on paper it looked perfect. But it wasn’t, storylines are always going to be difficult in time travel movies, and there are, I think, two types of time travel film, the first just ignores most of the logic involved and just has fun with it (bill and ted) in the second the logic is an integral part of the story. Looper falls into the second category, though I was really hoping it would fall into the first, it explains itself a little bit, but not enough to make this a really deep exploration of the complexities of time travel in the way that for instance True Crimes, which I wrote about fairly recently, was, but a little too much to leave much time for what I actually came too see, Willis either fighting his younger self, or pairing up with him and doing silly “I knew I was going to say/do that” scenes. There is a bit of this, but not nearly enough. Then there is the telekenisis, I mean when you have time travel to write about, why the hell would you then decide to put in a bit of telekenisis? It just seems really crazy that there you have this cool amazing thing to explore and its actually just a method of showing off some other cool amazing thing, now usually lots of cool amazing things is a good thing, but if one of those things is time travel, that’s a whole cool amazing quota filled right there. I’m basically just ranting about things I disliked about looper now, so I may as well discuss the final issue, which is that the whole film rests on the fact that time travel is outlawed and illegal, its clearly open to abuse, but honestly, with a time machine you could solve an awful lot of problems, even if it was just to go back and warn about natural disasters etc, it makes no sense for it to be so illegal, and even if we accept this, why does the looper have to die? I understand that enjoying a film about time travel and telekenisis requires that I suspend disbelief in a rather significant fashion, but this just seems a bit lazy, there must surely be a more logical way for the film to work, even Back to the Future had better reasoning than this, and that fell categorically into the ‘just have fun with it’ style of time travel movie. To sum up, Looper either needs way more shooting, car chases and brilliant time travel fight scenes, or far less of the above and a much better resolved storyline, either would work.