virag's movie reviews: limitless (2011)

there's something like 15 or 20 percent of a decent philip k. dick movie here.  i suspect that once the director and producers were sure de niro would be in the film, they immediately began phoning it in, figuring de niro would be enough.  they were wrong.  limitless starts off like a classic pkd story with a loser who thinks he's a writer, an impossibly hot girlfriend, and a slip into a dangerous, paranoid reality.  it's an interesting setup, but that is as far as it goes.  the script, the director, and the lead actor bradley cooper immediately get confused by the material and lose the thread completely.  despite what the filmmakers may have believed, this film is not a thriller or an action film or a clever mystery, and making the main character an unstoppable hero lacks imagination.  de niro completely embraces the phoning-in ethic, and whatever interesting story was possible goes completely unexplored.  i can see that most likely the problems started with the screenwriter who didn't understand what story she was telling.  that was followed by a director who didn't see those flaws and was equally clueless.  finally, bradley cooper believed his own press about being a top-notch hollywood leading man, so he played it absolutely wrong.  the silliness of the pharmacology is so far down the list of shit in the movie that it does not matter at all; this film was already as dumb as possible.  it's too bad; smart, talented filmmakers could have done something with this idea.  instead we get a fatally flawed, imbecilic mess that highlights the astounding lack of talent and imagination of the principals.