Time travel still needs some work.

Rating: 7/10 (30 September 2012)

Rian Johnson is a good director, but a little too ambitious. "Looper" had a ludicrous amount of hype (probably on par with "Inception"), and I can't say it lived up to it. First off, the whole arm-carving thing was stupid. It's not like tattoos don't exist in the future; Bruce Willis visibly has some Chinese characters on his neck. Second, there was no reason for them to hunt down Paul Dano's 'notyet' when they could have just killed Dano (which they ended up doing). I also thought that the whole concept of "dropping" was hilariously dumb. (Remember the eyeballing vodka trend? It's worse than that.)
As for Johnson's cinematic style, it has its ups and downs. There's a shot I love where the camera rotates around Joseph Gordon-Levitt's face in the club, but throughout the movie there were about half a dozen quick dark-to-bright shots that really weren't helpful. The distance shot of Old Joe knocking out Joe was priceless, however. And Johnson really downplayed the importance of TK. I didn't see any mention of that in the trailers. (Unless you count Emily Blunt floating the lighter in midair, inexplicably.)
Time travel is well-presented here, but it's not that inventive and the movie wasn't perfect.