Film Review | Looper

Abandon all logic, ye who enter here.

Like all time travel films, Looper is rife with mind-boggling paradoxes and potential plot holes, and if you think about them too much - as Bruce Willis's character warns about half-way through, in fact - you're bound to go crazy.

So it's fortunate that writer-director Rian Johnson (Brick, The Brothers Bloom) approaches this time-hopping, genre-bending gangster thriller with enough panache and passion to disguise - admittedly, often unavoidable - plot pitfalls.

Its central premise seems pithy at the surface, though you know its unravelling will give way to some high-powered sci-fi frenzy.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt - his visage made spade-faced by prosthetics to better resemble his future self - plays Joe, an 'executioner' for the mob in 2044, whose job is to get rid of people zapped in from 30 years ahead - where time travel is a possibility, albeit an illegal one.

Though he's handsomely remunerated for his efforts, this unique career path comes with a bitter proviso - at some point, Joe, like all fellow 'loopers' will be sent a version of himself that he would have to waste so as to 'close the loop', since time travel is, apparently, "so illegal" that the mob can't afford to leave any traces behind.

But though Joe is perfectly comfortable with the nihilistic trajectory of this lifestyle - numbing himself with drugs and living a life free of any emotional side-tracks - it appears that his future self (Willis) has different ideas.

And when Future Joe finally zaps into the past to face his fate, he makes a run for it - landing his past self in serious trouble with the gangland higher-ups.

Set on simply getting the job done and getting his boss (Jeff Daniels) off his back, Young Joe is forced to rethink his plan after Future Joe lets him in on some startling bit of information about their line of work 30 years on.

In case you haven't guessed by now, Looper is a heady experience all-round: as merciless with its demands on the audience as it is with its gritty violence and breakneck editing.

But it's also, in many ways, a joy to behold. Having established himself with 2005's Brick - a high school drama shot through a neo-noir lens, and also starring Gordon-Levitt - Johnson has proven himself to be a director hard-wired into the mythologies of pop culture and genre fiction, but who's also determined to elbow his geeky influences into more daring artistic terrain.

Not that Looper is exactly an intellectual experience, for all the mental gymnastics it asks you to tolerate. Unlike, say, Christopher Nolan's similarly layered sci-fi fantasia Inception - and much like its no-nonsense protagonist(s) - Johnson's film doesn't have time for lengthy exposition, relying on occasionally peppered narration by Young Joe (reminiscent of Gordon-Levitt's noirish turn in Brick) to keep us up to speed, before everything gets drowned out by the storm of twists and gangster shootouts.

But by the third quarter a young mother (Sarah, played by Emily Blunt) and her six-year-old son Cid (a brilliant Pierce Gagnon) are unexpectedly woven into the plot, and things take a deeper, far more interesting turn.

You discover that while he was baiting us with frenetic action and confusing us with time-travel puzzles, a very human story was bubbling under the surface all along, and it's this strand that ultimately wins out in the film's rather bold climax.

It's not perfect and it may not be the easiest film to take in, but Looper is also a very rare thing: an entirely original film that, despite being propped on the shoulders of many a genre touchstone, delivers a fresh jolt of crazy fun, and invites you to experience it all over again once it's over.