Looper (Rian Johnson, 2012)

Joseph Gordon-Levitt, continuing to be groomed along the road to unlikely hard man status after The Dark Knight Rises, is a hired killer in the near future, tasked with despatching people sent from 30 years further down the line as soon as they arrive. He gets a world-weary voiceover, as he did in Brick by the same director, a patina of angst over his work, which manifests as a drug habit, and a vulnerability that makes him unable to carry on doing his job clinically, even before Bruce Willis turns up as his future self in a nod to, and quite equally plundering of, his role in Twelve Monkeys. Looper is, then, a film original in that all the constituent parts have never been assembled in exactly the same way before, while at the same time it's easy to go through it ticking off the sources and debating whether best use is made of each. Bruce gets to shoot a lot of big guns and concurrently an honest stab is also made at some vague existential purpose in an attempt to satisfy allcomers, but the internal logic gets somewhat shaky by the finale.

5/10