Film review: Limitless

It's a funny time of year. The Oscar bait has all floated downstream, but the North American summer season is yet to open. For a couple of months, the multiplex is awash with all sorts of odds and ends.

There are the films too lousy to risk opening when anyone might actually notice them, but which contractually have a week on the big screen.

And there are the moderately interesting but unclassifiable comedies and dramas that no-one in a Hollywood marketing department knows quite how to flog.

These are films with ideas, though not necessarily any good ones. And perhaps a bit of a personality, though probably not one you'd invite around for dinner.

Limitless is one of the latter. Based on the novel The Dark Fields by the writer Alan Glynn, Limitless tells us the story of young Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper). Morra is a down-on-his-luck writer, living in New York, and battling all the demons that Hollywood dictates writers must have.

Morra is, in no particular order, depressed, drunk, unkempt, newly single, and beset by writer's block. In fact, the only really surprising thing about Morra is that he's played by Bradley Cooper, who seems to be in the running for handsomest-young-leading-man on the planet.

Morra has a run-in with his ex-brother in law, who was once a drug dealer, but is now a pharmaceutical rep. And the bro is quite happy to slip Morra a pill he says will heal what ails him.

Within 10 minutes of taking the pill, Morra has cleaned the flat, knocked off an essay, had a quick game of Where's Wally? with the landlord's young wife, and is thinking seriously about dinner and a nice hair cut.

But next morning, the effects of the pill are gone, and so Morra is off to find some more, in the hopes of regaining all the clear thinking and optimism that he had the day before.

Pills secured, Morra sets about making a killing on the stock market, which brings him to the attention of everybody from the ex to Robert De Niro. And then things start to go very queer.

So Limitless is nothing much more than a retread of that tired old jalopy "What would you do if you suddenly found you had superpowers?" Well, no. That might have been what the producers and the fool who cut the trailer together thought they were watching, but Limitless also has a few ideas of its own.

The film works pretty well as a satire of the pharmaceutical industry, and reasonably well as a mild thriller about a man on the run from the forces of naughty big business. But where Limitless scores big is as an absolutely terrific black comedy about adults with ADD, and the whole Ritalin industry.

There is a moment, about an hour in, when De Niro's Wall Street tycoon peers at Morra and says, "Oh God, you're not one of those ones who can't have a conversation when the television's on are you?".

When the penny dropped, I started to enjoy Limitless very much indeed.

So, a good film? Not really. Limitless fails as a thriller, and that is what the marketing had promised us. But Limitless is a very funny film, if you happen to be in the right company.

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