Looper

LITTLE ROCK — Looper

88 Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis, Emily Blunt, Jeff Daniels, Paul Dano Director: Rian Johnson Rating: R, for strong violence, language, some sexuality, nudity and drug content Running time: 118 minutes

You are a “looper,” your job is simple: The mark appears and you cut him down with your blunderbuss. You take the silver strapped to his back, you burn the body. Your job is also lucrative.

Your victim is from the future, where he has offended your employers, who have sent him back to be dispatched, by you, in a Kansas cornfield, 30 years in the past. He disappears from his own time, without a trace. No one looks for him in your time — if he’s alive, he’s not missing. It is a very clean system. Nearly seamless.

Time travel is only available in the future; it hasn’t been invented yet. And it is illegal — because obviously there are dangerous potentialities. The man who hired you is from the future. He has obvious advantages, but the only way he can go back is to grow old.

One day a mark will appear and you will cut him down. And you will find not silver but gold on his back. You will remove the burlap hood and find yourself staring into your own eyes. Your contract has expired, your loop has been closed. Enjoy the next 30 years.

But what if? What if you don’t kill your older self, what if he runs? What if he gets the drop on you and takes off? (What if he kills you?) Loose in the past he could have a terrible effect on your bosses in the future. This cannot happen.

This is the intriguing setup to Looper, Rian Johnson’s remarkably straightforward and admirably unperplexing time travel noir. It stars the estimable Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the immoral looper Joe, with Bruce Willis as his older and somewhat warmer self. (The physical resemblance between these two actors was enhanced by the fake nose Gordon-Levitt wears, which becomes distracting at least until you figure out that he’s wearing a prosthetic. They probably shouldn’t have bothered with that, since Gordon-Levitt is obviously capable of a fairly mean Bruce Willis impression.)

Johnson opens his movie in a gritty urban Kansas city (I like to think of it as Lawrence, although we don’t really know) then shifts it to a lonely farmhouse for the film’s second act, where Emily Blunt is protecting her mysteriously gifted child — who’s destined to make some big noise.

One of the most enjoyable things about Looper is the way Johnson cants this world just a few degrees into the future (cell phones have gotten even thinner, you get your kicks from eyedrops, but the weaponry and the gangster lingo is retro — you carry either a blunderbuss or a gat) and at one point, Jeff Daniels (the mobster from the future) remarks on the sullen persistence of the necktie as a touchstone of men’s fashion. Most of the vehicles seem to be refurbished and adapted models from our time, although motorcycles, at least, can fly.

There is a richness to this world that recalls Johnson’s auspicious debut, 2005’s Brick, a noir which starred Gordon-Levitt as a high school student investigating the murder of his former girlfriend, that transposed the hard-boiled dialogue of Dashiell Hammett’s crime novels from the 1930s to modern Southern California. (And in the process confused thousands — check the comments at the film’s Internet Movie Database site for a sample.)

But if Brick was too clever for some, Johnson seems to have applied that lesson to Looper. While it’s a smart and sharply realized vision of a not-too-distant, not-too-dystopian future, it doesn’t get too fussy with the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics. It’s one time travel movie that won’t make your head hurt.