A time-travelling loop-the-loop

Rating: 6/10 (9 October 2012)

Writer-director Rian Johnson's sci-fi action film is complex and original but not necessarily clever, and only marginally entertaining. Upholding the script's integrity is discarded in favour of maintaining its crowd-pleaser status.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Joe, a mob killer known as a 'Looper', who takes out the trash from the future by shooting them in the present (2044). Time-travel rules have to be broken when his latest target – his future self – escapes at the point of execution. Bruce Willis plays the older Joe. He evades his younger self every time Execution day arrives, as he intends to find The Rainmaker, a mythical Looper who kills his wife in the future.
Instead of explaining his impressive concepts, Johnson resorts to the easy cliché of making his characters ignorant of their own world. The closest we come to time-travel exposition is a line by Looper manager Jeff Daniels, 'It fries your brain like an egg', or better still Willis's line, 'I don't wanna talk all that time travel crap; we'll be here all day making diagrams with straws'. Those are funny lines, but when you stop chuckling you know you've been had.
Gordon-Levitt is easily upstaged by the doyen of action cinema. With intense make-up he looks nothing like a younger Willis, and his characterisation is even less convincing. He doesn't have the presence of prolific actor, and yet he is one. Paul Dano has a small role as a fellow Looper, which he quivers through as is his custom. Emily Blunt convinces as the independent farm girl whose precocious toddler, Cid is key to the plot.
I figured out the twist long before the reveal. It is so obvious, that I thought it was dramatic irony, where the audience is intentionally privy to something the characters aren't. I can't prove this of course, but be in no hurry to find out for yourself.