LOOPER: I've seen the future and it looks like Bruce Willis

The most depressing aspect of director Rian Johnson's imagining of our near future is not the widespread homelessness or the rampant, casual gun violence.
It's the fact that in 2044 we'll be driving the same cars as we do today!
Seems that President Obama's rescue of the US auto industry 3 years ago wasn't enough to ensure long-term survival and after 2012 Detroit just stopped designing new cars.

All-in-all the next thirty years does not hold much for us to be cheerful about if LOOPER is to be believed. This thriller paints a pretty grim picture of the United States where the only thing that's really different from today is that engineers have found a way to take the wheels off motorbikes and make them hover a few feet off the ground.
Well, that and time-travel.
It still doesn't exist in 2044, but by 2074 it will have been invented and immediately banned, but that doesn't stop criminal syndicates from our future's future using it to send back to their past (but our future) criminals that they want murdered. That's because by 2074 not only will we have time travel and hovering motorbikes, we'll also have a body tagging system that makes it almost impossible to do away with someone surrepticiously.
So those marked for death are bundled into the time machine (which looks like an industrial washing machine) and dispatched to 2044 where Loopers like Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) are waiting with a shotgun to blast them into eternity.
It's a profitable business if you don't mind the blood but it comes with an inescapable expiry date. In order to conceal the fact that they're using illegal time-travel to bump-off undesirables, the mob of the future also periodically sends back the older versions of the Loopers of 2044 to be executed by their younger selves, thereby closing the loop.
Which is how Gordon-Levitt finds himself hunting down Bruce Willis, who is the Joe he's become by 2074, and whose time is now up.
Because Willis was Gordon-Levitt he knows the fate he has in store, and he's determined to avoid it so he can find and kill the child who will grow up into the ruthless mob boss who orders his execution.
(I promise you, this is definitely easier to follow on the screen than in print).
All of which sets up a tense cat and mouse game that allows Gordon-Levitt to show off his impressive Bruce Willis impression (with a little assistance from a prosthetic nose and - more disturbingly - lipstick and over painted eyebrows) and Willis to demonstrate that at 57 he still possesses his 'Die Hard' era tough guy chops.

I'm a sucker for time travel movies and particularly enjoyed writer-director Johnson's refreshing twist on the traditional time travel plot, with the younger Joe having zero interest in learning anything about his future from the older Joe, while the elder Joe's contempt for his younger self's hotheadedness is tempered by his vested interest in keeping him alive.
Stand-out amongst the supporting cast is Jeff Daniels demonstrating there's more to him than two decades of bland leading man roles might have suggested, while Emily Blunt also acquits herself well as the world's most unlikely farmer.
LOOPER is a gripping combination of sci-fi and thrills which will keep you pretty much on the edge of your seat right up to the final showdown. It works because the story is unpredictable, uncomplicated despite the subject matter, and succeeds in avoiding most of the holes and implausibilities which tend to dog time-traveling tales. With just one exception that I spotted, there's not the distractions caused by trying to figure out whether a certain thing really would or could happen when a character travels through time.
With LOOPER to add to 'The Dark Knight Rises', '50/50' and 'Inception' Gordon-Levitt continues his inexorable march towards Hollywood leading man status and director Johnson sets himself a high bar to clear with his next project, whatever that may be. For the rest of us, unburdened by such career opportunities or challenges. there's nothing more required than to sit back and enjoy.