D/S: Rian Johnson. P: Ram Bergman, James D. Stern. Cast: Bruce Willis, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Emily Blunt, Paul Dano, Jeff Daniels, Noah Segan, Piper Perabo. UK dist (Blu-ray/DVD): Entertainment One.

Rian Johnson’s Looper attracted decent notices on its release, largely (one assumes) from critics grateful it was neither a sequel nor a remake. Hell’s teeth: are we that starved of good ideas in modern genre cinema that we’ll rush to praise any old thing, so long as its story can’t be summarised by a string of other film titles? Apparently so. Pitched as a thinking man’s actioner, Looper is nowhere near as clever as it should be – and it’s not much cop as an action flick, either. It has an OK gimmick bogged down by some ponderous chit-chat. The protagonist is both dull and unsympathetic. And the title’s rubbish.

So what’s it all about, then? Towards the end of the 21st century, time travel is invented – and is immediately outlawed. It’s quickly adopted by organised crime as a neat means of bumping off the competition: you just tie up your victim, stick a bag on his head and zap him back 30 years into the past to a pre-arranged time and place, where a hired assassin – known as a “Looper” – promptly blows him away and disposes of the evidence. (See, in the future it’s much harder to kill someone and not get caught – unless they don’t exist. And in the past, the victim has no identity anyway so can’t possibly be traced.)

This line of work is not without occupational hazards. A Looper may discover the victim zapped back for assassination is his future self, a housekeeping tactic known in the trade as “closing the loop”. Such an assignment is accompanied by a golden handshake – the victim’s body loaded with gold ingots, as final payoff to the Looper for services rendered. He can look forward to 30 years of luxurious living, always conscious of his inescapable fate. But this is happening more and more frequently. A future crimelord, known only as “The Rainmaker”, has single-handedly taken over all the syndicates and has begun systematically closing all the loops…

Enter Bruce Willis. He’s the grizzled future version of “present-day” Looper Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, looking slightly odd here sporting the distinctive Willis snout), captured in the future and sentenced to the usual fate. But the gangsters have killed Old Joe’s wife, too: big mistake. Old Joe promptly escapes and jumps into the past, determined to find The Rainmaker and kill him before he can grow up to secure his criminal empire. This future kingpin of crime is currently a cutesy 5-year-old kid, with a tendency for Akira-style telekinetic tantrums; and, wouldn’t you know it, young Joe has fallen for the boy’s mother (Emily Blunt), setting himself in direct opposition to his vengeful future self. And I haven’t even mentioned future crime boss Jeff Daniels and his frock-coated goons, gunning for both Joes with their fancy long-barrelled revolvers…

At the heart of this superficially tricksy plot lies an elderly moral conundrum: if time travel were possible, would you go back and kill Hitler while he was still a wee nipper? It’s a pretty tired notion, and one not really invested with much in the way of fresh zing by writer-director Rian Johnson; in the nature-versus-nurture debate, he falls predictably into the latter camp. Monsters are made, not born – so all a troubled kid needs is the love of a good mother to divert him from the path of darkness. All very worthy, and even possibly true, but it doesn’t make for very exciting story-telling. The time-paradox which the Joes find themselves locked into by the third act will be predictable by anyone with a working knowledge of the genre, so surprises are pretty thin on the ground. Still, the film evinces a smidgen of grisly originality early on: if a Looper wants to arrange a meeting with his future self, all he has to do is bloodily carve a message onto his forearm, which the future version reads like an email in scar tissue. (This notion is carried to comic-grotesque extremes when an elderly Looper finds himself rapidly losing his fingers, nose and other extremities as his younger self is whittled to nothing on an operating-table.)

Beyond that, it’s not much to write home about. Gunplay is surprisingly minimal, with more emphasis placed on young Joe’s ethical moping with Mommie Rainmaker. Jeff Daniels is probably the best thing in it, turning in a wry and world-weary turn as the future mobster sent back in time to oversee the Looper operation. But he’s given little to do, and for much of the time we’re stuck with Joseph Gordon-Levitt and his drab concerns. Willis is okay here in what is essentially the Terminator role – hardly challenging stuff, but at least he puts some oomph into it. At ninety minutes, Looper might have succeeded as pacy trash; but at two hours, it’s a tough slog.