Forget Die Hard, Bruce Willis's Most Rewatchable Deep Cut Just Took Over Apple TV

Image via TriStar Pictures Published Aug 20, 2026, 6:54 PM EDT Jeremy has more than 2700 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows. His favorite directors include Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog, John Woo, Bob Fosse, Fritz Lang, Guillermo del Toro, and Yoji Yamada. He's also very proud of the fact that he's seen every single Nicolas Cage movie released before 2022, even though doing so often felt like a tremendous waste of time. He's plagued by the question of whether or not The Room is genuinely terrible or some kind of accidental masterpiece, and has been for more than 12 years (and a similar number of viewings). When he's not writing lists - and the occasional feature article - for Collider, he also likes to upload film reviews to his Letterboxd profile (username: Jeremy Urquhart) and Instagram account. He has achieved his 2025 goal of reading all 13,467 novels written by Stephen King, and plans to spend the next year or two getting through the author's 82,756 short stories and 105,433 novellas. Sign in to your Collider account Bruce Willis retired from acting in 2022, but left behind a huge number of movies he’d either starred in or had supporting roles in. Some are not so great, sure, because there’s a variety here with the quality much as there’s a variety of genres (Willis did a bit of everything), but the classics can’t really be denied. Die Hard is the big one, and so that rather scandalous headline telling you to forget about it… maybe just temporarily forget. Look past it for a bit, because it does tower over everything else, which is fitting, since it takes place in a skyscraper. At the same time, you might want to peer over Pulp Fiction, The Sixth Sense, and Twelve Monkeys… wait, maybe not Twelve Monkeys. See, Twelve Monkeys is a time-travel movie, and would make for a good double feature with Looper, which is also about time travel. Looper’s currently doing well on Apple TV, proving there’s still a fair bit of love for it out there, 14 years on from release. Unless you're a time traveler from 2012, in which case, it might've felt like – and actually been – yesterday when Looper came out. Welcome to 2026, by the way. You might want to go back, though. Anyway… Looper! Lots of reasons why it’s good, why it holds up, and why it also proves a particularly good film to rewatch. The Story of 'Looper' Image via TriStar Pictures Looper is a movie with a premise that could be called high-concept. Basically, if something sounds wild or outlandish, but also very enticing, you could be dealing with a high-concept premise. Here, it involves time travel and assassins. Basically, people are sent back in time to be killed by hitmen who are waiting for them, as it’s much easier to dispose of bodies in the present than it is in the future. The people who do this line of work get compensated well for it, and they also get to retire fairly young, though the contract involves having to kill your older self, which is known as closing the loop. One man having to battle his older self is fun, and then Looper does also throw in some more characters and story ideas. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays the main character, sort of, named Joe. Bruce Willis also plays the main character, sort of, also named Joe. Willis is the older version of Joe that the younger version of Joe fails to kill. Old Joe is loose in his past, but Ordinary Joe’s present, and this presents a great many complications for the crime syndicate using time travel. One man having to battle his older self is fun, and then Looper does also throw in some more characters and story ideas, perhaps a little less successfully, since there’s a kid named Cid (Pierce Gagnon) who has telekinetic powers, and he’s destined to kill Old Joe’s wife, once he becomes a feared figure known as The Rainmaker. So, Old Joe has to escape Ordinary Joe while trying to murder a child, which Cid’s mother (Emily Blunt) is obviously having none of. How 'Looper' Holds Up On Rewatches There’s a lot going on for a movie that is only about two hours long, and doesn’t have any sequels, spin-offs, or prequels, but there is also something nice about how it stands alone. It closes its own loop, so to speak, and doesn’t really need to be expanded. Director Rian Johnson has been able to tell stories in multiple parts since Looper, because Knives Out became a series, and he was, at one stage, connected to Star Wars post-The Last Jedi, directing more films in that galaxy far, far away, but they never came to be. So, with Looper, you just have to rewatch it. Thankfully, there’s a lot here worth watching again, because it’s got some inventive and exciting action sequences, things that make more sense when you know where parts of the movie are going, and other little things that click into place once you're caught up. As with other time travel movies, a few bits here and there might actually make less sense the more you think about it, but you’ve probably been through such a rodeo before. It happens, and you take the good and the bad when rewatching a movie like this. It’s usually mostly good, though (see also the genuinely good Terminator movies – namely, the first two – and arguably Tenet, too). 'Looper' Stands as One of the Last Great Bruce Willis Movies Image via TriStar Pictures It’s mostly concerned with entertainment, so Looper isn't quite as dense or realistic as a time travel movie like Primer (though that one is still more enjoyable than you might expect). It does feel a tiny bit more grounded than something like Back to the Future, though, and maybe even the Terminator films, since there’s a lot less comedy than there was in the former series, and a bit less by way of explosive action than found in the latter series. In other words, the screenplay and acting need to do quite a bit of heavy-lifting for something that might seem like a bit of a blockbuster, and Bruce Willis proved more than capable of rising to the occasion, as far as the acting was concerned. Looper stands as one of his last truly great movies, though you do also have Moonrise Kingdom, from the same year, but his role in that one was a bit smaller. And, sure, 2019’s Glass was interesting, yet a bit of a mess. Looper is bittersweet in hindsight, as a possible last hurrah for Willis before his health necessitated he step away from acting, but it was great he was able to thrive in Looper, and prove perfectly cast alongside Joseph Gordon-Levitt in perhaps the most creative and entertaining time travel movie since 1995’s Twelve Monkeys. And hey, you remember who was mentioned as also being in that one… it all comes full circle. And now, the loop is closed. Looper Release Date September 28, 2012 Runtime 118 minutes