This week I watched two movies that coincidentally opened in the same week in 2012. Neither delighted me.

In Looper, the terrible threat to be averted is a gangster bent on — gasp — wiping out a group of retired killers. I should care? The targets aren’t even interesting: they’re not so much hitmen, which would suggest some need for cleverness in their métier, as overpaid slaughterhouse workers.
In the end, why does Joe’s “change” (it’s a time travel story) erase Sara’s death but not Cid’s wound?

Seven Psychopaths is self-consciously ironic, “transgressive” and self-referential; nothing here that hasn’t been done better.