What would you do if you were a down and out writer and were suddenly given a miracle drug that would unleash the other 80% of your brain you don’t use?
This is not a question Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper) loses much sleep about in Limitless (out on DVD).
When he gets the miracle drug, NZT, he does what most writers apparently would do. He starts trading with stocks and, like Faustus, seeks and gets power - in the form of money, cash, moola.
He doesn’t decide to become a Nobel-winning author or a philosopher, for example. He doesn’t try to solve the world’s moral or material problems. No, he becomes a trader. But then writers are such fickle creatures. Oh, he does also learn the piano and a couple of languages in a matter of days, so he’s not completely uncultured.
But if his girlfriend (Abbie Cornish) drops him because he is all blocked up, then she’s quick to take him back once he’s gone straight again. That is, rich. And what’s the next logical step for a man of wealth in the United States of America? Why, the White House of course.
If this broad summary sounds cynical then I’d like to add hastily that this is a very entertaining film too. Made by the highly imaginative writer/director Neil Burger (The Illusionist), the story has amazing visuals and effects to match Inception – and it’s less indulgent: it clips along at a good, thriller-like pace.
Burger also very cleverly changes the lighting when Morra is “on” as opposed to when he’s just a struggling hack, and there’s a great soundtrack to be heard.
Obviously drugs like NZT don’t come without snags and where there’s money to be made the worms will come out of the woodwork. This is what gives the film its tension and urgency, but it could have been a little more satirical about that handful of people on Wall Street who are, after all, screwing us so royally.
***
Across the Atlantic there is the “explosive thriller” Incendiary (also on DVD), starring Michelle Williams and Ewan McGregor.
Interestingly, Williams’ character doesn’t have a name, though the backside of her jeans tells us she’s a Sexy Mama. If this is chauvinistic then it’s of a very special kind, because the director is a woman.
Sharon Maguire spends much too much time establishing that there’s a special relationship between what the IMDB calls a Young Mother and The Boy. The first visuals of the two of them trying to outstare each other without blinking at bedtime is tender and more than enough. But other scenes carry on, though admittedly they also illustrate how lonely and isolated this woman is. But it all eats up time.
In her voice-over, Williams tells us she’s a typical chav, watches Top Gear and her and her family’s religion is Arsenal Football Club. Fair enough. Her husband does have a name for some reason. Lenny (Nicholas Gleaves) is a bomb disposal officer and “tense and remote” doesn’t even begin to describe what he’s like.
This leaves Williams on her own much of the time and she will start having an affair with the man, Jasper Black (McGregor), who lives across the road. He’s a journalist and drives an Aston Martin or something equally ostentatious, and he isn’t even an economics reporter or editor.
Anyway, in the middle of coitus the unthinkable happens: there’s a bomb explosion at an Arsenal vs Chelsea match her husband and child are attending.
That’s the explosive part of the film, and there’s no Russian connection, but there’s no thriller part either because director Maguire constantly dwells on the maddening pain of loss Williams is going through. That makes it a drama.
She now befriends the Muslim child of a suspected terrorist and, to cut a very long story short, she ends up in hospital for a second time, which becomes unintentionally funny.
Moreover, her shrink has told her to write letters to Osama bin Laden and we hear those in voiceover too. The final nail in the coffin of this film is when she tells the now late Bin Laden that if he could see her and Black’s newborn infidel his heart would soften.
Neil Sonnekus
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