Embarrassingly ill conceived

Rating: 5/10 (20 November 2012)

As it is often the case, this movie's badness itself didn't really stun me to any serious degree- rather did the praises and loads of positive reviews it received.
In my eyes, as can be easily deduced from the rating I gave it, the film wasn't anything critics promised. Rather than being clever and intelligent about the time travel premise, the writer/director didn't seem to deem it necessary in any way, to waste one thought about what is relatively plausible and what utter idiocy.
I will assume that the reader has already seen the movie and therefore take for granted that she or he has the plot still in mind. I also won't give a comprehensive list of plot flaws, as many other users have done, i.e.: pointing out the fact that it's plainly unbelievable that time- travel should be used by some criminals to dispose of bodies . Such "little" flaws maybe could have been acceptable, or even gone unnoticed, if the central element of the story wasn't a giant singularity of writer-stupidity.
In order to see this, we have to consider some vitals segments of the course of the plot. The passage I have in mind isn't really shown linearly and continuously in the film- maybe the director tried to draw the viewer's attention away from the completely illogical structure of the narrative:
At first, we see our protagonist Joe (1) standing in the field, that is his murderous workplace, waiting for a victim to appear. Then, of course, Joe (2) from the future arrives (without the standard victim's apparel: his head is exposed), overwhelms his younger ego and escapes. The younger guy wakes up some time later and heads to his apartment, where he fights some goons and in the process gets thrown off the balcony. After that, there's the above alluded to inexplicable break in the narrative, which I at first interpreted as a stylistic device.
The screen blackens. Later we see young Joe- standing in his field again, exactly as before. Again, Joe-from-the-future appears- but this time only to get shot down helplessly by his younger self (he has his face covered, in this scenario). We see young Joe (Levitt) getting transformed into old Joe (Bruce), who after 30 years is sent back to be killed.
This old Joe (Bruce) manages to break the loop and escape his younger self. The plot then continues at the point where the screen faded to black before.
So what happened here? The "old Joe" (Willis) managed to avoid his execution, therefore "breaking the loop". But this "old Joe" (Willis), in his youth, managed to kill his older self. Actually the only way it was possible for the "old Joe" to become the "old Joe" he is, was to kill his (then) older self, when he was still young. Therefore by "escaping" the execution through his younger-self, he (Willis) already completely annihilates himself.
To generalize this explanation: The older Joe depicted by Willis, after having escaped, necessarily must now have a different past than the young Joe depicted by Levitt. Because when the now old Joe, was still a young Joe, his respective old Joe, did not survive. So the Joes, that are the movies protagonists, cannot be identical. (Nothing that interacts with a temporally displaced version of itself can be the very same thing it interacts with) There is a section of their lives (namely: the execution on the field) that is temporally the same, but not structurally. The causal link between young and old Joe is completely ruptured at this point.
And this, my friends, is an utter outrage: The premise of much of the movie is an error in thought. There is no way, young and old Joe could coexist.
The ending later, again, is a cheap bluff: Young Joe "realizes" that a temporal-causal loop will always lead to the uprising of the rainmaker and his murderous spree in the future (this of course is nonsense- there is no real loop present in the film, as I went at lengths explaining above; it's more of a causally incoherent, fragmented spiralor something). Because he wants to prevent the telekinesis child from becoming the Rainmaker, he kills himself, so that his older Willis-self won't be able to kill the child's mother, as this would lead to the child becoming a sociopathic sorcerer.
As young Joe thus dies by his own hand, old Joe obviously immediately disappears. Apart from that nothing else happens. Mother and child (not so) merrily cruise away.
But let's remind ourselves: Young Joe is only in that field, because he had to confront the old Joe. But the old Joe's existence, as it happens, is already, and always has been, terminated because of his younger versions suicide. So the younger version never having been confronted with angry old Joe never had any reason to walk into a field and kill himself there. So how then could mother and child have gotten into this field, let alone, how could they have even seen the older Joe (who never existed)? etc.
Does this sound familiar? Yes: It's actually a slightly different version of the grandfather paradox. Instead of murdering his own grandfather and therefore cancelling his own existence instantly and trough all time, making the murder itself impossible, young Joe is compelled to kill himself, by the arrival of his older self, which could have never existed because he killed himself still a young man. The old Joe is necessary for the young Joes decision to kill himself. But this exact action makes its own cause impossible.
Interestingly, this is what Roger Ebert has to say about the ending: "This film leads to a startling conclusion that wipes out the story's paradoxes so neatly it's as if it never happened." Well said sir, well said.