Looper - Two Bruces Willis

Or one Bruce really, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt done up to look like the younger Bruce.
This is sci-fi in the near future dystopia sub-genre. One of the refreshing aspects of the film is that it soft-peddles the technology.  The future looks a bit like the '50s, which works okay considering today looks like the '80s.

The film is written (and directed) by Rian Johnson and manages to get away with a bit of a scriptwriting no-no - it has a premise complicated enough to require a lengthy voice over exposition. The complication is that it is set in a future which is in contact with a slightly more distant future. 'Loopers', such as the protagonist, are executioners who knock off whoever is looped back to a pre-determined time and place. This is rather dangerous territory for a protagonist - the least we usually expect from such a character is that he should need to carry out his task with skill and guile, but this guy just pulls a trigger.

To make matter worse there is a disturbing reference to body looting, as the targets carry payment of silver (yes, I think 30 pieces...) strapped to their backs.  What makes this protagonist stand out from his colleagues is thrift. He saves his pieces of silver while his buddies blow it all on party drugs and questionably wardrobes.  Our hero dresses retro, and in fact the film has a strange 1950s feel to it.
There are also resonances of the Terminator films with the mother and child saviour/anti-Christ type scenario. It's hard to know if the reference is intended, or perhaps the Terminator scenario has entered the mythography of time travel story-telling.

Of course one of the requirements of a good time travel story is that it has to play with the metaphysics of paradox.  This does so quite well.  One of the tasks the loopers face is to execute their future selves (it's complicated...) and this is explored well.  The film uses a fairly standard character device here, where only the protagonist and one other have the insight to see that this particular hit - lucrative as it might be - is not in their own long terms interest.  The way it works of course is that the One Other crosses this particularly threshhold (sorry, Joseph Campbell ref) first and doesn't have the heroic qualities to prevent a sticky end.  And let me say, the end for this character is particularly sticky - cloever, but deeply disturbing.

Bruce does some quite good suffering in this film.