Great idea, dreadful execution

Rating: 4/10 (29 July 2013)

This is one of the most frustrating films I have seen in a long time. The premise is of the invention of a drug , NZT,which maximises the brain's potential offering huge creative and financial advantage to those that take it. However an awful screen play by Leslie Dixon is crippled by the straight jacket of Hollywood's formulaic demands which the Director, Neil Burger, is unable to resist.
Lead actor, Bradley Cooper as Eddie Mora, tries his best with a script which engages and intrigues with its concept at the start, then becomes lost in a series of unbelievable plot twists. His rise to fame and fortune, and the price he pays for it, is reminiscent of stories about those gifted with extraordinary wealth or opportunity. But each page of plot development creaks. The impecunious out of work writer is dumped by his girlfriend, but soon he will be able to have any girl he wants, so that is OK. Money doesn't buy him happiness? Really? But it does buy you a better class of misery.
Robert de Niro appears unsatisfactorily as a ruthless business mogul in a crude , underwritten role, simply to add some muscle to the cast. The story loses interest in the sci-fi dimension quite quickly to become a thriller, then a crime caper, and finishes with an awful bolted on feel-good schmaltzy ending. The idea is a 9/10, the execution a 3/10, saved by some good special effects and solid production values.