Limitless casts Bradley Cooper (The Hangover part II, The A-Team) as Eddie Morra, a hapless freelance writer whose life has wandered off the stage without anyone noticing; he spends most of his time procrastinating in a house that looks like a landfill, or telling random strangers in bars that yes, he really does have a book contract, it's just not coming along so well right now. Then one day he runs into his ex-wife's brother-in-law, a shady type who offers him a miracle pill that unlocks that fabled eighty percent of your brain we supposedly never get to use.
Despite what Eddie expects, the pill proves more than effective. Before long he's able to focus his full attention on pretty much anything he puts his mind to; he's finished his book, reorganised his apartment, got physically fit, begun learning new languages and started swanning around exclusive nightclubs with the beautiful people, all of whom are hanging on his every word. Looking for a bigger, more important project, Eddie turns to the stock market, catching the eye of business mogul Carl Van Loon (Robert DeNiro), but finds out the pill may not be quite the manna from heaven he thought, and that his meteoric rise has attracted some very unwelcome attention.
Limitless was adapted from author Alan Glynn's 2001 novel The Dark Fields, and this is basically the root of the film's problems. Yes, you should be able to assess the pros and cons of any literary adaptation completely independent of whatever book it was based on, but the easiest way to explain why Limitless doesn't work is to single out just how messily it hacks up its source material. What we've got is a scriptwriter trying to turn a densely plotted character drama with the odd modest setpiece into a breakneck piece of popcorn entertainment that lazily asks 'Wouldn't it be cool if...?', only by the time it's over they've forgotten they ever asked the question.
There's no real attempt to explore the morality of what Eddie Morra does, or its downsides. Abby Cornish plays Eddie's long-suffering girlfriend, who's dumped him as the film begins then takes him back once he's a chemically-enhanced Mister Universe - but she mostly exists to bring him crashing down to earth once the Russian mob and shadowy political cabals are hot on his trail. This isn't you, it's the drug, she insists, about as subtly as a PSA for Ritalin-addled teenagers. We see what coming off these pills cold turkey supposedly does, and that it inflicts terrible damage on the human brain, but Eddie never seems any worse than his original pasty white look before he starting taking the stuff.
One of the big ethical questions from the book is introduced, but glossed over, then dropped entirely in favour of more conspiracy theories. And the ending defies belief, opting for a lazy, throwaway about-face on everything that's previously been suggested which rates only a few rungs above 'It was all a dream'. Bradley Cooper tries hard, but Limitless needs much more than a vanilla everyman with a makeover in the lead and Cooper simply lacks the charisma to sell the missteps as anything but. DeNiro barely has to stretch to play a mercurial tycoon, but he doesn't get enough of the running time to lift the film past above average.
All of this is even more frustrating when you consider what Burger gets right - while Limitless is plainly trying to wow multiplex audiences the director throws in several CG flourishes that suggest how good the film could have been were it not so obviously focus-tested. Some of it is just embarrassing - letters falling from the ceiling while Eddie works on his novel? - but the dizzying infinite zooms and fish-eye distortion showing how the drug takes hold are fantastically unsettling. It almost manages to be great.
The opening arc is a hugely entertaining ride, even for those who've read the book, as you settle in to see just how far Eddie can get before someone or something throws a roadblock across his path. When Limitless sticks to the original text and pumps it up with a multi-million dollar budget the film shows flashes of nervous, technicolour brilliance. The thing is, Leslie Dixon's script is pathetically averse to turning off the average viewer, avoiding any difficult ethical talking point, but it doesn't give us anything instead - bland moral homilies and vague allusions to secretive government plots don't make for a gripping thriller, and the ending is pitifully lazy.
Limitless is by no means bad. Burger proved his technical chops with The Illusionist, and he and his crew are pros enough to put together a mildly diverting hour and forty minutes. But it's an empty sort of diversion, one without the childish spectacle of a Michael Bay movie, yet that keeps teasing you with the promise of a memorable conclusion to wrap all its plot threads up that simply never arrives. It's almost worth watching to see how it hints at the film we could have got, but the sheer laziness with which it wraps up - loose ends left hanging, Big Reveals ignored and a false note of positivity slapped on in the very last minute - means Limitless only deserves a cautious recommendation at best.
THE DISC:
Momentum Pictures' UK BluRay of Limitless, available to buy now, is mostly what you'd expect for a high-profile blockbuster hitting home video - lots of EPK fluff and dry technical commentary that doesn't add much to anything more than a casual viewing. If you like the film, though, this is a fantastic presentation, with a transfer that shows Neil Burger's work off to great effect. The disc starts with several trailers (The Vanishing on Seventh Street, Red Hill, The Mechanic, The Woman in Black), which may be skipped one by one or altogether. Menus are a little flashier than they need to be, but generally easy to navigate. The film is divided into twenty-four chapter stops.
The DTS 5.1 soundtrack is perfectly adequate, clear and balanced with consistently audible dialogue. None of the set pieces are especially explosive, though there's a fair amount of raised voices, club music and car engine noise. Nothing here should trouble anything beyond a standard speaker setup, though. Removable English subtitles are large, well-positioned and easy to read. Some non-English spoken dialogue has hard subtitles.
The picture is excellent. It's not perfectly clear, but the quality is more to do with Neil Burger and DP Jo Willems' choice of colour palette and FX than the level of definition - everything has varying amounts of moderate grain, and several scenes are shot with warm, oily, over-saturated filters or the contrast turned way down. It's a flashy, sometimes garish film, but the artificial gloss on everything works to the film's advantage, with the best bits (like those infinite zooms) all but leaping off the screen, vibrant and wonderfully trashy. It might suffer on a huge screen, but on a simple monitor it's absolutely captivating.
A Man Without Limits (4:29) and Taking it to the Limit: The Making of Limitless (11:38) are the EPK fluff, two brief compilations lifted from the same publicity interviews and behind-the-scenes material with everyone slapping each other on the back and talking up the premise in the most banal Hollywood clichés going.
Neil Burger supplies a commentary track, which is unsurprisingly as dry and businesslike as the EPK material would suggest - he mentions the odd interesting snippet of trivia, but nothing that surprising, and does resort to describing what happens on screen rather too often for this to be anything like an essential listen.
An Alternate Ending is included (5:14), which stretches the definition almost as far as it can go: this is fundamentally the exact same ending with a few different camera angles and an alternate take on the climactic dialogue. The Theatrical Trailer (1:46) does a fairly good job of selling the film, though with the caveat that yes, it's essentially as empty as the trailer makes it look. The first three of these are in high definition, though none has any subtitles.
Limitless starts out impressively strong, with one of the more engaging pseudo-scientific hooks a mainstream American production has had in a while, but despite some eye-catching technical flair and visual invention nothing about the plotting delivers on the potential the idea would seem to offer. The cast try their best, but they either don't have the presence or enough material to elevate their roles, and while the narrative has some definite high points the way the story simply peters out into a shockingly lazy, poorly conceived ending suggests neither Burger nor anyone on his crew really grasped what made the original novel work, much less tried to apply it to the language of cinema. If you still want to see Limitless, though, Momentum Pictures' UK BluRay is short on meaningful extras but gives the film a truly excellent presentation.