10 Infamous Movie Plot-Holes (Solved By Film-Makers)

Looper is riddled with discrepancies. Most are small and inconsequential to the overall picture, but there is one in particular which is a head-scratcher, and it's all to do with the villain of the story - the Rainmaker.

In the film, Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a "Looper", a hitman who kills people sent forward in time by a vicious crime syndicate. On one of his missions, Joe realises that his latest target is his future self (Bruce Willis). Old Joe escapes before he can be killed, and in an alternate timeline we get to see what Old Joe's life was like; a timeline in which Joe killed Old Joe. There, the future shows that a guy called the Rainmaker is destroying the crime syndicate and closing the "loops" used to move the targets.

In the main timeline, Old Joe hunts the Rainmaker as a young child and tries to kill him, but Joe kills himself (and Old Joe by default), saving the young Rainmaker and potentially altering the future of the loops.

However, it's suggested in the film that the Rainmaker is created because Old Joe kills his mother, Sara (Emily Blunt). When Joe kills himself, Sara is saved too, meaning the Rainmaker never becomes what he becomes, and Old Joe never goes back in time and kills Sara... It's all one big clusterf*ck which director Rian Johnson puts down as the idea that there are many alternate realities where every possible outcome is being lived.

It's a good film, but...sigh.