Not terrible, but not as good as reviews will lead you to believe

Rating: 6/10 (7 October 2012)

The only way I can explain the overwhelming reviews for this movie is that critics want to back an up and coming director, or that this year is so dismal for film that they are desperate to crown a new "Inception". While it wasn't completely horrible, this is definitely not a movie in the 8.4 - 9.4 range.
Labels like "inventive" and "thought provoking" are appropriate for a movie like Inception, but do not apply at all to Looper. I believe Rian Johnson is talented, but he has not yet made a movie that is anything close to Christopher Nolan's better films.
Review after review stated that this movie brought "something new" to the time travel genre, but what? Encountering your past/future self has been done a million times, as has trying to change the future by altering the past. OK, so what else? The telekinetic angle has been done into the ground, as has the super child with the ability to change the world for good or evil.
The only real original concept here is one that doesn't really make any sense in the first place. This is the idea that the mob would send people to the past when they wanted to kill them. While that is an interesting way to whack somebody, doesn't it seem just a bit risky to send people, who you want to kill, alive to the past where they can potentially be a risk to your entire existence. And not only that, but you also have a deal with the hit men that one day, they too will be disposed of this way? Why wouldn't you simply kill them and THEN just send a dead body back to prehistoric times to get rid of the evidence?
But then again, those are the kinds of questions that Looper conveniently doesn't have to answer, with clever lines such as, "I don't want to talk about all that time travel crap."