Director: Neil Burger
Stars:***
It’s easy to see why Cooper, who still has a long, long way to go before he can put Hangover behind him, is the guy to play Eddie – a down and out, scruffy writer, for whom things are falling apart, who can transform into a cocksure, smooth Wall Street type with just the right drug.
While that transformation is taking place, from a straw-haired Eddie to the gelled-back version, Limitless keeps you involved. Burger is clever in portraying the physical manifestation of an illegal drug going by the name NZT, which works by helping you use at once all 100 per cent of your brain (as opposed to 20 per cent you normally do). So, anything you ever read, saw, heard or experienced “is immediately available to you”, organised and in a manner that you can deploy to the best advantage.
In Eddie's case, that helps him first finish his book, by apparently focusing his ideas, and then helps him transform himself into a broker who can work wonders with numbers, by just cutting through the fog to spot patterns which may not be visible to others.
That’s suitably mindboggling for us not to ask any questions there. But how about the fact that in an economy in recession -- which the film is set in -- a recession brought on thanks in no small measure to some unwholesome market transactions, nobody wonders about a broker turning 12,000 dollars into 2.5 million in 10 days?
At least somebody needs to be asking those questions, particularly when Limitless doesn’t itself draw any limits, boundaries or grounds for itself. There are downsides, but many upshots to the drug; there are murders, but their stains easily washed; there are failed love stories which never really fail; and the drug is a secret but apparently not much of one.
NZT is a wonder “recipe for grandeur”, in the words of Eddie, even if it how it all ends is quite in the grey. Not quite unlike Limitless.
