"Limitless" takes such a great idea for a motion picture and does not do a single interesting, thought-provocative, or exciting thing with it

Rating: 5/10 (17 November 2011)

If Alan Glynn's novel "The Dark Fields" is anything at all like "Limitless," the feature-length movie directed by Neil Burger that was adapted from it, then I can hardly fathom why anybody thought it was worth making into a motion picture. And if they were going to adapt it, the filmmakers should have developed the courage to rework and rethink the material and turn it into the sort of story that it should have been.
The excitement before seeing "Limitless" only enhanced my disappointment in it. It's such a great idea for a movie! What would it be really like if a human being could access the full potential of their brain's capacity? Scholars have debated for years, but the general consensus is that even the smartest of people can only utilize somewhere between 10-20% of their mental power. So, according to "Limitless" and the screenplay written by Leslie Dixon, what would happen if some bum novelist (Bradley Cooper) got a hold of some pills that allowed him to use all of his mind at the same time? Who can say, but what the movie demonstrates is the most subliminal and uninteresting details. When he takes the pill, Mr. Cooper's vision turns into a yellowish glow, he smiles a whole lot more often, speaks a lot of mumbo jumbo, slicks back his hair, has sex with the landlord's wife, writes a novel in a few days, contends with a loanshark who later gets hungry for the pills, and goes to Wall Street.
How anticlimactic.
At a certain point, things almost start to look up for "Limitless" in what later turns out to be one of the lamest plot twists in recent movie history. For a second, we're lead to believe that slicked-up Mr. Cooper might have gotten involved in some kind of a murder scheme.
Well, that plot never goes any further than anything else in the movie. In other words, nowhere at all.
Limply directed by Mr. Burger, "Limitless" is full of nonsensical gibberish, cheap visual gimmicks, and a couple of hamhanded action scenes between Mr. Cooper and the loanshark, who is stereotypically portrayed by Welsh actor Andrew Howard. The cast shows some talent, including Robert De Niro who looks tired and bored throughout the picture, but there is no energy in "Limitless." It takes such an incredibly interesting premise with so many open doors (so many that frankly, to make a movie this dull out of it regardless of budget restraints is inexcusable) and yet it does not do a single interesting, thought-provoking, or exciting thing at all with it.