“Time-Travel Assassins”

“Hotshots” looks at a movie!

Looper is a pretty good movie about time travel that uses the classic paradoxes about time travel, but doesn’t bother going into too much detail trying to explain them.

That is why they are called “paradoxes.”

Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars as Joe, and Bruce Willis stars as Joe, too. I mean, “also,” not the number “2,” because they are both playing the same person. So, let me call the Willis character Old Joe.

The story begins in 2044 in Kansas, and Joe is an assassin for the mob 30 years in the future who is called a “looper.”

You see, even though time travel is illegal in the future, the mob uses it in order to get rid of people they want killed.  If people are killed in the past, then they never existed in the future, right?

Then Joe tells us in a voice-over that the mob boss of the future, who is called The Rainmaker, is closing all the loops by sending his assassins’ future selves back in time to be killed by their younger selves, and he says, “This is called ‘letting your loop run’; it’s not a good thing.”

Joe is notified of the time that a victim will show up, and it occurs out in a field where Joe has already made disposing of the body easy.  The victim suddenly appears with a hood on, and Joe blasts the person with his weapon, a blunderbuss that can’t hit anything over 15 yards.

Joe is paid with bars of silver strapped to the victims’ bodies, and he is saving for his future and learning French, because he plans to retire and move to France.

However, Joe knows about “closing the loop,” and so he is not completely surprised when Old Joe shows up as a victim.

Then we get some flash-forwards into the future that explain Old Joe’s life and how he suddenly shows up in 2044 in Kansas, but in different circumstances from Joe’s other victims that allows Old Joe to escape from Joe.

And so the rest of the movie is about both Joes trying to kill his other self in order to get out of the dilemma he is in, which also involves a Kansas woman named Ana, played by Emily Blunt.

Looper closes all the loops and then manages to end.

I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”