Hero, anti-hero, or villain? How to get it completely wrong

Rating: 4/10 (13 January 2016)

Deadbeat writer takes mind-expanding pill (NZT) that brings instant brilliance except that they haven't sorted out the side effects and loads of bad, bad guys want it bad too. Great premise, great FX, thrilling action, but ultimately a big letdown.
PhantomAgony's excellent review of Limitless says much of what I think: there are really, really stupid plot beats for one thing:
1/ The police don't bother to search Morra when he calls them to his shot-dead suspected drug-dealer brother-in-law's apartment. He has a large bag of NZT pills stashed in his waistband while in custody for several hours.
2/ In spite of now being a financial genius worth $2m, Morra forgets to pay back the vicious thug he borrowed $100,000 from.
3/ A man suspected in two ongoing murder investigations carries on an unprecedentedly successful senatorial campaign. Like that would happen.
4/ He hires bodyguards who are not on NZT rather than buy and learn to handle a gun himself. That would be too obvious, I guess.
5/ The professional hit guy cannot outrun either a small woman or a man with a badly injured leg.
The second problem is the faulty character development. Ed Morra (Bradley Cooper, really good) starts off as the plain, inept, ordinary hero who gets a crack at greatness. Over the course of the movie, he cheats on his fiancée twice, possibly murdering one cheatee, tells his fiancée to take a dose of the drug so she can escape a bad guy in spite of having just left his ex-wife who advised him that it's one-way ticket to miserable death, and abandons said ex-wife completely once she has fulfilled her plot purpose. He then becomes a smarmy, unpleasant Wall Street politico who's the biggest SOB in the valley and do you know what? HE DOESN'T PAY ANY PRICE. Getting away with being a total a-hole is completely wrong in terms of the starting character dynamic. In fact, Robert De Niro turns out to be the most noble character, simply by default. Cooper goes from Forrest Gump to Gordon Gecko. It's like Faustus (Walter White, even) getting away with it; dramatically totally unsatisfying.
And the nasty undercurrent of this movie is its misogyny. Cooper's ex-wife (Anna Friel) is simply a cipher to indicate the misery of NZT's side effects. Once she's done that, she's dropped completely, in spite of the character being a vital part of his past. Cooper's fiancée has no existence beyond her relation to him, and once he has told her to take the same deadly NZT we don't see her again for over a year; and she's perfectly fine, as though she's been in the character fridge. The scene with her as a woman using NZT (and physically assaulting a young girl) to outwit the bad guy is obvious tokenism. And when he buys this super-duper apartment, why doesn't he move his fiancée in with him - or at least have to explain to her why not? Because in this movie, women don't matter.
In the end, Limitless turns into another grating Wall Street politico/financial drama (Bob De Niro as hardass CEO, anyone?) and you end up not liking the hero; not feeling that he has redeemed himself, not rooting for the troubled villain - you just don't like him because he turns out nasty. The more I think about Limitless, in spite of its fine dramatization, the more I dislike it.