Looper

This morning I went to the doctor and got pills for my stiff neck. So many pills that I will rattle if I jump up and down after taking them. I have painkillers, and anti-digestion tablets if the painkillers strip my stomach lining, and muscle relaxants. Dozens of them. I could have a makeshift drugs party with the mound of pills in front of me.

No pills to stop my brain being mangled by Looper. I don't mean the plot, which encouragingly states pretty early on that it's not going to make any explanation of time-travel paradoxes. No, I mean the work they did to make Joseph Gordon Levitt look like a young Bruce Willis. Turns out it's all about the receding hairline, the heavily painted on eyebrows (what are you, Sean Connery pretending to be Japanese in You Only Live Twice?) and the stubble.

Oh, and Piper Perabo looking raddled. Has she been up to much since Coyote Ugly? Apparently not.

There are a few gaps in the plot, and I felt the big twist in the final part could have been foreshadowed a bit more, but all in all it's a good film, until you start asking why some of the paradoxes resolve the way they do, or how JGL's character knows how to communicate with Bruce Willis (it's strange that he does what was done to his friend, Paul Dano, when it's never clear how he'd find that out.)

I was passing in an out of consciousness in the final third of the film, which has some ludicrous shoot outs that feel a bit like Bruce Willis demanded them, and also has the same duvet cover that is on our bed. The fact that I've been sleeping on this movie tie-in for a year must imply that I'm a time traveller too, right?

The film comes to an end with dead silence, and it was fun to feel the audience around me collectively going "unhh?" as the lights came up. It feels a little baggy in the second half and could lose a few minutes somewhere, but it's pretty good as not-too-dumb Friday night fodder.