The price of perfection

Rating: 5/10 (30 March 2011)

Based on the novel The Dark Fields by Alan Glynn, Limitless has been gaining glowing reviews from different publications, like Empire, Time Out and Spill.com. But to me it is a film that a win for style over substance.
Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper) is a struggling writer suffering from writer's block and girlfriend (Abbie Cornish) broke up with him. His ex-brother-in-law Vernon Gant (Johnny Whitworth) sees him on the streets of Manhattan and offers him special drug, NZT. NZT increases a person's intelligence and makes them use 100% of their brain. Eddie starts taking it, finishing his book in four days and starts playing the stock market, making a massive fortune. He gets to work for a powerful businessman, Carl Von Loon (Robert De Niro) but slowly Eddie becomes more addicted the drug, suffering side-effects like confusion and memory loss and gets in deep with Russian gangsters and running into trouble with business rivals and the police.
Neil Burger certainly made a great effort to make what could have been an internal story into a visual experience. One element of his direction that worked was showing before any takes NZT the world is shot with a drab grey filter and afterwards the world is bright, a symbol of the potential a person can fulfil. There are visual tricks like letters raining from the ceiling or seeing numbers ceiling like on a old airport message broad. But some moments are very trippy whether it was a small thing like seeing many hands or showing the passage of time and location using a mirror scene like the White Spites music video for Seven Nation Army. Some of the scenes showing the negative effects of the drugs and the withdrawal symptoms felt like Burger was trying to make a mainstream Requiem for a Dream. Overall there is not much in the actual plot and the film was disengaging. Some events felt like their were skipped over which I sure were possibly were looked at more detail in the novel. Spill.com claimed that Limitless was a lot like Fight Club: but I think it's a long way from matching that film.
Cooper's character joked to his two bodyguards never wear the same suit: this is not The Matrix, I certainly agree with that statement. There is also a scene when Cornish is clashed over a ice rink and basically I thought how could anyone do that on shoes without falling over: there is also another plothole that scene took play in around April, when most outdoor ice rinks in New York are only open in the winter.
The acting is fine throughout the film: it is good to see that at least Robert De Niro is trying to fine a decent film (compared to Little Fockers). Bradley Cooper was perfectly fine as the lead and he will get more leading roles. But his character was nihilistic, a character who used his new gifts for himself to make money and sleep with woman. It could be argued that would be how a person would really act if they had developed this level of intelligence but it made it hard to make an audience sympathise. Andrew Howard who played the Russian Gangster Gennady looked to me very much like cross between Jason Statham and the computer game character Niko Belic. Sadly many of the female characters just disappeared off the screen.