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Looper was selected as the opening film of the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival. It was released to positive reviews in Australia on September 27, 2012, and in the US and the UK on September 28, 2012 by TriStar Pictures and Alliance Films.
In the futuristic gangland of year 2044, 25-year-old Joseph Simmons (Gordon-Levitt), works for a mafia company in Kansas City as a "looper". Loopers kill and dispose of agents sent back in time by their employers from corporate headquarters in Shanghai from the year 2074. Loopers are foot soldiers, paid with silver on the condition that all targets must never escape. When crime bosses want to end a looper's contract, they send the older version of a looper back to be killed by his younger self and pay with gold, referred to as "closing the loop". Joe's boss, Abe (Daniels), was sent back in time to manage the loopers and also owns a club where Joe frequents and spends time with Suzie (Perabo), a showgirl.
One night, Seth (Dano), Joe's friend and a fellow looper, visits him in a panic telling him that he was supposed to close his own loop but couldn't do it. Joe hides Seth in his safe and visits Abe, who tells Joe he can either give up half of the silver he has saved as a looper or give up Seth. Joe eventually tells Abe where he hid Seth, and is wracked with guilt over betraying his friend. Seth is tortured to lure his future self (Brennan) to the gangsters, who kill them both.
When Joe is sent to close a loop, he hesitates when he recognizes himself (Willis). When Old Joe manages to escape, Young Joe cuts a message into his arm to get Old Joe to visit him at a diner. As they have breakfast, Old Joe explains that when the Rainmaker, the mysterious mastermind who has been closing the loops, sent his or her men to send Joe back, they killed his wife (Xu). He killed his captors and sent himself back in order to kill the child who becomes the Rainmaker. Young Joe still plans on killing his older self to fulfill his contract and escape the mafia. However, they’re both forced to flee when they are attacked by Abe's men led by Kid Blue (Segan), but not before Young Joe tears a part of a map out of Old Joe's pocket with coordinates and ten digits.
Young Joe follows the coordinates to a farm house owned by Sara (Blunt), who lives with her son Cid (Gagnon). When Joe shows Sara the map, Sara recognizes the ten digits as Cid's birthday and the serial number of the hospital he was born in, prompting Joe to explain the situation about the Rainmaker. However, when the database shows two other children born on that date and in that hospital, Old Joe decides to systematically kill all three children. After killing the first of the three, he changes his mind on the second when he sees it is Suzie's daughter.
As Young Joe and Sara become close, he learns that she is a telekinetic, and that Cid was raised by Sara's sister for most of his life until she was killed, and Cid doesn’t believe that Sara is his real mother. One morning, they are attacked by Jesse (Dillahunt), who is killed when Cid falls down the stairs and lets out a telekinetic blast. His extraordinary telekinetic powers – which are far more powerful than most telekinetics - cause Joe to realize that Cid is the Rainmaker. At that moment, Old Joe makes a second attempt to kill Suzie's daughter, but receives the new memories of Young Joe that Cid is the right child, before being taken by Kid Blue.
Young Joe tells Sara and Cid to drive away while Old Joe is taken to Abe. When Old Joe breaks free, he kills everyone except Kid Blue. As the two Joes confront each other near Sara's house, Kid Blue attacks and is killed by Young Joe. Old Joe then blocks Sara and Cid from driving away and when they try to escape into the cane fields, Old Joe shoots Cid in the jaw without killing him, prompting Cid to let out another telekinetic blast. Before Cid can kill Old Joe, Sara calms him down and gets him to accept her as his mother. Old Joe tries to kill Cid again, but Sara stands between them. Young Joe realizes that Sara's death at Old Joe's hands will lead to Cid becoming the Rainmaker, thus creating a closed time loop. He decides to kill himself to erase Old Joe from existence, save Sara and prevent the Rainmaker from rising. In the aftermath, Sara finds Young Joe's silver in the van Old Joe drove.
The final scenes show a parallel between Joe and Cid where Sara is shown combing her hand through each characters hair at two different points in time.
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