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Bending genre plasticity is Rian Johnson's strength, as is reinterpreting referential fragments into something subtle yet riveting. Slyly quoting various practitioners of sci-fi, whether outlandish—Cameron, Gilliam, Otomo—or minimal—Carruth, Godard—Looper is an intelligent, increasingly rare crowd pleaser.

Looper is really a parable of self-absorption, a story of a man looking himself in the eyes and coming to the startling realization that he's allowed himself to become a monster. Johnson's deft script initially splits your sympathies, as it's difficult, at first, to tell which Joe is more emotionally centered.

Perhaps it was the combination of Bruce Willis and a sci-fi-action premise, with the connotative power of Joseph Gordon Levitt and Brick injecting a dose of indie-noir, self-aware sentiment that offset me from the beginning. Additionally, I was forever trying to critique Gordon Levitt's fun portrayal of an action icon: what parts of his reconstructed Willis-esque face were make up and what parts CGI? And how much of the embodiment was Gordon Levitt's physical mimicry and performance prowess?

Looper, a cocky sci-fi tale with more brass than substance, is rife with these "Say what?" moments. And though writer-director Rian Johnson smartly tries to eclipse the technical with the personal, that strategy only works if you have a lead who earns our sympathy. It takes time — and Joseph Gordon-Levitt turning into Bruce Willis — for that to happen, but it's all the encouragement we need to forgive the film's irrationalities and enjoy its offbeat performances and stylized nihilism.

The dystopian setting, in which all U.S. infrastructure has eroded and everyone has a price on his head, makes for some bold cultural commentary, but as usual with Johnson, the engaging ideas feel like affectations rather than products of a fully developed sensibility.

Looper," an obstreperously entertaining, bullet- and attitude-ridden science-fiction pastiche, opens in a futuristic world that looks and sounds paradoxically out of the past.

If the ending seems a little too hedge-betting, Looper nonetheless satisfies wholly on the level of dramatic necessity. Thrilling in its deft juggling of complex narrative elements, utterly clear in its presentation, and unfolding with what feels like serious moral purpose, Looper still can't help but suggest that its larger ambitions are something of a put-on, a nice thematic polish to set off its interpersonal drama.

It's the stuff that routinely calcifies one's cynicism toward pop filmmaking, but Johnson sets these facets into motion with such a deft and intricate sense of storytelling, such a bold, robust emotional palette, that one is rather reminded of what made these tiresome tropes so successful in the first place.

Not only is the smart, sexy, sophisticated but still slam-bang sci-fi action-thriller not dead, it's just gotten itself a potent shot in the arm by way of writer-director Rian Johnson.

To an extent, I wonder if Johnson's admirable trust in his audience to keep up might fairly be viewed as a failure to communicate on his part. Nevertheless, there's surprising power to the premise of a person literally confronting the man he's become 30 years later, and getting to those revelations takes some doing.

A terse science-fiction thriller about time-traveling hitmen, Rian Johnson's Looper may boast the star-heavy cast and commercial appeal typical of so much TIFF fare, but it also reconfigures elements of Marker's La Jetée (1962) with the same ingenuity as Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys (1995), a touchstone that Johnson acknowledges by casting Bruce Willis in his movie too.

Johnson lets a few of his many spinning plates wobble—he never sells either of the love stories, especially because Willis' paramour is little more than an Orientalized ideal—but he keeps his compositions clean, his pacing fairly tight (a montage showing Gordon-Levitt slouching into stone-jawed Willisian form is especially nifty), and introduces his more ludicrous elements at a rate that sustains the film's air of half-respectable frivolity.