Futuristic killer thriller

Film review: Looper (15)
Rating:***
You only need to watch a few minutes of Looper to realise that, along with most people in Great Britain – or so we are told – Hollywood film executives are not strong in the physics department.
They are good on camera angles, and grasp the concept of computer generated images well, but the concept of time travel – and its unfortunate consequences – seems to have escaped them.
Even a Swiss patent clerk – one Einstein, A, – was quite clear in his General Theory of Somethingorother, that a person cannot exist in the same physical plane as his other self from a different time.
So you can’t go back in time – even if it was on the NHS – and have a chat with yourself and sort out one or two things, like the winning numbers of the Lottery.
But Looper, in order to have a story, ignores all that common sense and has multiple versions of the same people floating about, chatting quite happily.
Now, this is just not on and director Rian Johnson should have got a grip, but then, when you have Bruce Willis on board, along with the very nice Emily Blunt, saying ‘No’ firmly may not be an option.
So, what you end up with is a very confusing – but entertaining – film about a future breed of assassins who don’t go looking for their victims, but whose victims are dispatched to them – from the future.
Just why anyone would think it’s a good idea to get someone sent back 30 years in order to kill them rather than just run them down on the road to the Essex marshes and bop them there is not fully explained.
However, leaving aside time collisions, narrative flaws and why an assassin whould have a blunderbuss as a killing weapon, this film paints a fascinating picture of a future world where politicians have become obsolete and gangs run everything.
In a world of constant drug-taking, total anarchy and short, brutish lives, power is everything and assassin Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) has everything – until he fails to kill his older self (Willis), sent back for dispatch from the future.
There then ensues a complicated chase involving Joe’s employers, angry at his lack of success in the killing field, Old Joe, who is just angry and Sara (Blunt) who seems to hold the key to everything, that is to say a young child who is good at making people explode.
There is a neat twist of an ending, but you had best see that for yourself, because I haven’t got the faintest idea what was going on by then, although I thought it was all very entertaining.