The basic premise is that sometime in the future (2060s or so) time travel is invented. And it's immediately declared illegal and heavily regulated. The only people that have access to time travel are the people willing to bend and break laws. Hence, crime syndicates. Also, in the future our worst paranoiac fears have been confirmed and we're all tracked by some sort of implant that makes it near impossible to get away with committing murder. Here's where looping comes in. The mob has figured out a way of offing its enemies by sending them back in time to be killed and disposed of. Their assassins in the past? Loopers.
Now, in the future, it's so illegal to have time travel that once a looper runs into the present (the guy in the past meets up with himself in the future) he's snatched up, sent back in time, and killed by himself. It's called "closing the loop" and you get a nice bonus and the knowledge that you've got exactly thirty years to live. While it's never explained in the movie, time travel seems to have an effective range of only thirty years; that's how far back you go, and that's how far back anyone seems interested in going. Again, we're never really told how time travel works, but its not very important to the story.
As you can already guess, Joe closes his loop. Bruce Willis pops out of thin air. But instead of killing himself, future Joe (or Old Joe, as he's referred to) gets the upper hand on his younger self and escapes. This is sort of a conundrum for Young Joe. As long as his older self is running around, the syndicate in his present thinks he's gone rogue and will do everything they can to hunt him down and make sure Old Joe gets dead. When a prior looper fails to close his loop we're shown very convincingly how the mob makes sure knowledge of the future stays secret.
If "Looper" was only about Young Joe hunting down Old Joe and trying to get his life back, it might have stood on its own, but the screenwriters add another wrinkle that really makes this movie shine. In the future, someone is steadily killing every other crime lord and assuming power, including power over time travel. The first thing this person does is close every loop they can find. In this instance, Joe experiences the power and ruthlessness of the new syndicate and resolves to hunt down the new boss, called The Rainmaker, in the past and eliminate her.
This is the real story at the heart of the plot. It's the eternal question: if you had the opportunity to kill Hitler as a child, would you do it? This tension drives the heart of the story, and is the central question continually posed to the Young and Old Joes.
One of the primary distinctions to "Looper" though, is the way in which it deals with its time travel. (Warning: SPOILERS ahead.) Most time-travel stories deal with the messy business of past and future by maintaining a strict philosophy of time travel. That is, one of two scenarios are usually invoked. First, that what happens in the past always happens. Noah Iliinsky, writing for Wired, calls this immutable time. The second option is malleable time, where the flow of time is changeable in some regard and what you do in the past affects future events. Certain notable exceptions tend to prove the rule, namely "Groundhog Day" with it's closed-time loop, and "Inception" with the premise that the perception of time is all in the mind.
"Looper" makes an additional exception, in that while some events are modifiable, others are not. In Dr. Who parlance, they are "fixed points in time." That leads to interesting speculation as to whether or not the ending of the movie even mattered. Maybe some things are simple meant to be, or have affected the lives of so many people that they cannot easily be altered. The inertia of time is against it, so to speak.
Regardless "Looper" is a taut, emotional film full of action, violence and just a little bit of nudity with all the mind-bendyness we love in our sci-fi. I give it a hearty two-thumbs up and would definitely recommend it to a friend.
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