This past week, the new science fiction action/thriller Looper opened in theaters to overwhelmingly positive reviews and solid box office numbers. I can see why: It’s a visually engaging movie with great performances from everyone involved, with good pacing and several gripping plot concepts driving it along. But, it’s also a muddled mess of a film that barely approaches being intelligent and instead relies on a lot of emotional clichés and overused tropes. Most damning, though, is that it violates its own premise, and makes perhaps the most mind-numbing choice a story can make: altering the basic rules of narration. Time travel movies can break a lot of narrative rules, but Looper does something that is not only technically offensive, but simply nonsensical.
[Read more. Tons of spoilers for Looper]