Bruce Willis Cast In Rian Johnson's Looper

I'll get this out of the way right now: awesome. Bruce Willis can do great work when he's paired with a strong, determined director. I figure Rian Johnson will be pretty determined when he gets on the set of Looper, his third feature. So I'm happy to see a report that not only seems to confirm the casting of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, but announces Willis has a role as well.

Looper being a time travel movie, however, the details of who Willis plays could probably be considered some sort of spoiler. I imagine in the months (perhaps days) to come the info will be all over the internet, and perhaps eventually in the trailer. But if you want to remain as unsullied as possible, for the time being don't follow up after the jump. Deadline provides an interesting detail, which is that Willis will play the older version of Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character. The exact nature of their shared character has yet to be revealed, but there's fun to be had speculating on it for the time being, based on the synopsis we were recently given:

Looper is a time travel movie, set in a near future where time travel doesn't exist but will be invented in a few decades. It's pretty dark in tone, much different from Bloom, and involves a group of killers (called Loopers) who work for a crime syndicate in the future. Their bosses send their targets hogtied and blindfolded back in time to the Loopers, and their job is to simply shoot them in the head and dispose of the body. So the target vanishes from the future and the Loopers dispose of a corpse that doesn't technically exist, a very clean system. Complications set in from there.

So what's the story? Is their character a victim who gets away and then makes it forward into the future, leading to two versions inhabiting the same time/space? That's one possibility, but for the time being I don't even really want to know. I just like the casting. (Even though Willis, OK, not the first guy I'd pick to be the older JGL, but perhaps there's more to it than that. And I dig Willis; with Johnson, he'll make it work.)

If you want to know more tidbits about Looper, we've got quite a few small bits of info collected here.