The possibilities are well, limitless, in the concept at the heart of this action-thriller: a loser who takes a wonder drug which turns him into a winner, of sorts, before the wretched side effects and reality kick in.
Director Neil Burger and screenwriter Leslie Dixon skilfully mine plenty of thrills, suspense and a few laughs from the far-fetched premise for the first hour or so before Limitless implodes under the weight of a preposterous climax and an even more bizarre coda.
The promising set-up has a frazzled guy standing on top of a Manhattan building ready to jump, pursued by unidentified villains. He’s Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper), a struggling writer who can’t write, lives in a dingy apartment and has just been dumped by his gorgeous girlfriend Lindy (Abbie Cornish).
Via flashbacks, it’s revealed that Eddie’s fortunes changed after he ran into his ex-wife’s brother, a former drug dealer, who generously gave him a magic pill worth $800 called NZT. He’s told it’s a wonder drug that’s been approved by the FDA and will enable the user to access 100 percent of his brain, rather than the 20 percent which ordinary mortals supposedly get by on.
(That in itself is a myth: scientists say we use virtually every part of the brain and that most of the brain is active almost all the time.)
Eddie’s reluctant but figures what else has he got to lose? He swallows and is immediately transformed into a Megamind, an instant expert on almost any topic, who masters several languages, can anticipate events before they happen and in one night pounds out dozens of pages of his novel, delighting his publisher.
When he visits his ex-brother-in-law the next day, the guy’s been savagely murdered but Eddie finds a stash of pills, borrows money from a Russian gangster (a move which will come back to haunt him) and makes a fortune as a day trader.
Suddenly Lindy finds the now-flash Eddy attractive again and his financial acumen attracts the attention of Wall Street mogul Carl Van Loon (Robert De Niro), who enlists his help in engineering a deal hailed as the biggest merger in American corporate history.
But those side-effects put him into a tailspin, 18 hours pass in a blur, Carl loses faith in the whiz kid and Eddie is stalked and pursued by numerous people including the Russians.
Without giving away more of the plot, suffice to say he miraculously survives a confrontation with heavily-armed villains: there’s got to be a limit, hasn’t there, on how many bullets and other lethal weapons anyone can dodge, even someone as chemically enhanced as Eddie?
Looking scruffier initially than he did in The Hangover, Cooper responds effectively to the challenge of playing a guy who starts out as a whiny loser, is transformed into a cocky, abrasive winner, becomes scared and sick as his life unravels, and bounces back again.
But he can’t overcome the absurdities of the screenplay adapted from the Alan Glynn novel The Dark Fields or the dark side of his character. How do you empathise with a man who has no conscience, with or without those pills? For instance, he manages to instantly charm his married landlady, who’d been complaining he was behind in the rent, and bonks her without a qualm. Later the cops think he may have murdered a young woman during his spaced-out state; Eddie isn’t sure but doesn’t seem overly bothered.
Burger uses various clever visual tricks such as showing multiple Eddies performing various tasks and making the camera appear to rush through Manhattan streets and buildings, a thrilling ride.
As for De Niro, impersonating a powerful, ruthless tycoon with menace is a walk in the park for the actor, which just about sums up the effort he puts into the part. Cornish is under-used in the thankless task of playing a woman best described as a gold digger, and one scene in which she’s chased through Central Park beggars belief"¦..like much of the movie.
