Damn, this movie sucked. I can't believe that the RedLetterMedia guys liked it:
http://redlettermedia.com/half-in-the-bag-looper-and-dredd/
I agree with their assessment of Dredd though.
The premise was COMPLETELY disconnected from the plot about "The Rainmaker" and it couldn't seem more forced.
I literally laughed out loud when the younger version of our protagonist/antagonist snuck INTO a house where they were looking for him only to be secretly snuck OUT without having done ANYTHING. The people were not looking for the kid, the kid got himself out, and the idiot didn't have a thing to do with it. On top of that, just because they came out a hidden door in the middle of the ground doesn't mean there was anything special about the way they took to get out. He just walked through a plain-as-day obvious door that wasn't even hidden! If these people looked any harder, they would have just peeked inside, saw the tunnel, and gone through.
Now, other than loopers closing their loops, nothing says that the people being assassinated and the tracking technology being circumvented weren't coming from even farther in the future, so it isn't a plothole that they could kill people in 2074 (girlfriend and such). In fact, it makes perfect sense: Keep the entire loop in a time before their job was even necessary so that their activities will never be known in the future where it became relevant. Also, keep it at the advent of time-travel tech so that it will be before any potential countermeasures and legal measures could take effect. They never even said that everyone was tracked, so it's probably just important people even if it was already in place in 2074. To see Mike and Jay criticize it for this "plothole" that isn't really a plothole and then to give it a pass on things like timeline entanglement just because the movie doesn't want you to take it seriously is disappointing. Terminator 2 was how you do it without being serious. Showing real-time mutilation as someone is mutilated 30 years in the past just doesn't work without a COMPLETELY different (and
stupid) linked-timelines concept that doesn't fit the story
at all.
OK, so let's just do what they want us to do and not think about time paradoxes or any other silly objections (the entangled 30-year offset timelines are not actual time paradoxes and silly to dismiss as one). PASS ANYWAY. Now: Why didn't they at least try to explain to us why it isn't just as bad for a person with an tracker that can't be hidden in the future to suddenly disappear? Were their bodies not tracked until their disappearance for privacy reasons? What if someone was justifiably spooked and activated it before their death as a precaution and it led authorities directly to the illicit time machine operation? People say that it's just like today where you have no case if you have no body, but that reasoning doesn't apply in a future where bodies CAN'T be hidden. It actually ELEVATES suspicion and it would be turned into an even more serious crime every bit as quickly as time travel was outlawed. NO MENTION?!
I couldn't help but laugh at many of these scenes, right there in the theater. I felt like the RLM guys when they were watching the ending of that one Resident Evil movie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPUPaxgIo98