Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis. Rated 14A. Opens Friday, September 28, at the Fifth Avenue Cinemas

This goofily audacious sci-fi tale—an impressive third feature from Brick maker Rian Johnson—is more a philosophical meditation on the circularity of our puny lives than it is an action thriller. But, hey, Bruce Willis costars, so let’s not get carried away.

Mostly set in 2044, Looper insists that beyond that date, time travel has been invented and is giddily deployed by gangsters to send inconvenient people back three decades, where assassins called loopers await them with shotguns and advanced disposal techniques.

Sending victims the other direction, without bothering to bump them off, would probably be more efficient. And the wildly decadent Kansas City—with vagrants shooting each other while all cops are on the take—and an even more chaotic Shanghai suggest worlds in which bad guys needn’t worry about witnesses and such and would be disinclined to develop a labour-intensive hit-guy system, not even counting all the paperwork.

But a story has to have a story, and this one gives us Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a cynical killer who accepts the standard 30-year contract, letting him live it up until his loop is “closed”. One of his colleagues (Paul Dano) panics after importing the superannuated version of himself, while Joe can handle his snakily charming boss (a movie-stealing Jeff Daniels). Our guy starts to unravel soon after, when he encounters the 60-year-old Joe—good ol’ Bruce, who doesn’t resemble our skinny boychik but can sure handle those automatic weapons in a tight spot.

While chasing his own tail, as it were, young Joe retreats to an isolated farmhouse stocked with a hot single mom (Emily Blunt) and her tantrum-prone son (Pierce Gagnon). They enact a scenario that is part Sleeper, part Children of the Corn, with a dash of Chekhov and several dollops of The Matrix. Whoa! Gordon-Levitt does have a Keanu vibe at times, but the movie stakes out its own territory, and the loopholes invite interesting discussion.

Watch the trailer for Looper.