Why do the most intriguing sci-fi fantasies of the year have to end so stupidly? We’ve already seen one fun idea dissipate into cloying inanity in “The Adjustment Bureau,†and “Source Code,†which opens next weekend, takes an even more egregious dive from extraordinarily creative highs toward stultifying, illogical lows.
But perhaps no sci-fi parable this year wastes more of its copious opportunity than “Limitless,†today’s marquee release. Adapted from a book by Alan Glynn, the film offers a promising start, with Bradley Cooper as Eddie
Morra, a bedraggled wannabe science-fiction writer who’s already blown his literary advance without putting a single word to paper.
Things begin to spiral further downward, the way they often do in Hollywood movies about desperate people: Eddie is about to lose his apartment, and his girlfriend (Abbie Cornish) has just broken up with him. A chance meeting with Vernon (Johnny Whitworth), his ex-wife’s drug-dealing brother-in-law, opens up a new horizon for Eddie in the form of a clear, innocuous pill.
Vernon claims the pricy pill is awaiting its inevitable FDA approval and will soon be all the rage. Rather than get you high, it simply makes you more enlightened, opening up decades-old memory banks so that every piece of information you’ve absorbed in your lifetime will be immediately retrievable. Your senses will elevated to superhuman levels. Your confidence, creativity and even your fighting ability will be limitless.
Eddie is skeptical, but after a pill or two, he’s written a masterpiece, and he wants – needs – more. Little does he know that the highly illegal substance is really the property of some awfully dangerous people who will stop at nothing to reclaim their stash. So at the same time that he rebuilds his confidence, cleans up his act, wins back his ex-girlfriend and becomes a Master of the Universe on Wall Street (under the guidance of an under-utilized Robert de Niro), he’s secretly being pursued by shadowy pharmaceutical functionaries and clichéd Russian mobsters masquerading as loan sharks.
The movie’s dip into the dumb is a gradual descent, rather than, as in “Source Code,†a sudden cannonball dive into the idiotic. At some point, the movie stops playing by its own logic and gives in to contrived Hollywood silliness and excess. Quite simply, the film loses us, and makes us wonder why we wasted so much time caring about these people in the first place.
Director Neil Burger, who made “The Illusionist†a few years back, is a strong visual stylist. Here, he effectively conveys the drug’s mental rush – a sort of amplified methamphetamine mixed with a cognitive enhancer – in the form of several supersonic, tunnel-like zooms through New York City. These visual rushes are fit for IMAX or motion-simulation rides, and outside of “2001: A Space Odyssey,†they’re pretty unique.
Burger and his screenwriter, Leslie Dixon, can be accused, like William S. Burroughs once was, of glamorizing the junkie life, albeit a junkie life updated for the era of Big Pharma. But that would be to ascribe more social importance to “Limitless†than the film deserves. I wish it had something to say about our overmedicated times; instead, it just wants to show us that drinking the blood of a dead and drugged mobster is, apparently, just as effective as taking the drug yourself!
