silly but entertaining enough

Rating: 6/10 (30 January 2013)

In this fictional world, it's 2044 and all the advances that feminism wrought in my lifetime have apparently disappeared. While there are killers, enforcers, workers, drivers, and all sorts of people on the streets, they are all male (and mostly white); women can be either a) exotic dancers/hookers with no hearts of gold or b) drug-addicted mommies. Otherwise, it's a world of, by, and for men.
One man is a professional killer who kills people (who have done we know not what and may or may not deserve death) from the future who are sent back in a one-way time machine, controlled only by organized crime and used only for that one purpose. (Which is like having a laptop and using it only as a paperweight, but whatever. It's your laptop; do with it what you will.) Eventually, and for reasons not explained, the criminal organization decides to retire the hit men by sending their old versions back and having the hit men kill their old selves, and then they can retire, knowing they'll be dead in 30 years at their own hand.
Quickly, questions popped up:
1) Why retire your good, trained workers at their prime? 2) Why not kill them immediately? Or when they start getting sloppy? Why let a disgruntled downsizing victim run around for 30 years, angry at you? 3) Why have them kill themselves--won't any killer do? Doesn't killing yourself just up the revenge factor? Have them killed, and send a note- -doesn't that make more sense?
and so on. The plot makes no sense at all, really, but I turned off my brain and went along for the ride, which was pleasant and diverting enough, paced well, with action interspersed with character moments.
Eventually the hero encounters the mother of a little boy who is destined to become another crime kingpin and he has Magical Powers, which he is forced to use to defend himself because his mother is stupid as dirt and, in a dangerous world where attack by killer hobos is possible at any time, she loads her shotgun with rock salt rather than shot. So the kid has to be violent to compensate for her idiocy. (Some mother!) But we're supposed to like her, and she's the madonna to counterbalance other females who function only as whores, blahblahblah.
I was never bored, though my BS meter was steadily going off in the back of my mind with "hey but what about...": logical problems with the set- up and plot. At the end, I find I liked none of these characters, not even the little kid (actually, most particularly the little kid), nor the inept mother with the rock salt in her gun, nor the old looper whose mission is logically impossible if you think about it for two minutes nor the young looper who isn't at all admirable either, after selling out his only friend for cash. So the big dramatic ending had no emotional effect on me. Either these two would die or those two, or maybe all of them, and since I cared for none of them, any ending would have sufficed for me. The traditional redeeming sacrifice left me stone cold.
The scene with the disappearing body parts was cool in a kind of sick way. And I was entertained for awhile. To enjoy it the most, check your brain at the door before watching.