Limitless

Bradley Cooper plays man who is liberated from his writer's block by a new super drug in Neil Burger's Limitless

*** out of ****

Limitless is one of those high-concept thrillers that I don't think has a truly satisfying resolution but is still one hell of a ride and is definitely worth seeing. Its pharmaceutical-science-fiction plot is engaging and had me intently paying attention to every decision the main character made. The worst thing that thrillers can do, is involve you with a character in a tense situation and then have them do something that you can't relate to. It's usually when a writer unintentionally sacrifices the characters likeability to move the story along. This movie avoids that pitfall during its beginning stage and carefully calculates how to put the character in an unusual situation without the audience losing interest in him and waits for the right minute to throw the guy from a dull existence in to one of excitement and danger. Very entertaining. 

Bradley Cooper is a good looking guy who's pretty good at looking smart. In this flick, he is an unfocused writer, whose messy loser image feels a bit unnatural, but maybe that is because I'm not used to seeing him this way. He happens upon a test drug that somehow escaped the lab in great quantities. It allows one to utilize one-hundred-percent of their brain power. The movie uses very clever production techniques to give the viewer the perception of what the mind sees when on the drug. My first reaction when watching it was, "Holy Shit! It's Super-Adderall". Naturally the drug has what I would imagine Super-Adderall side-effects would be like, and they are the movie's most threatening conflict.


It doesn't make a lot of sense that Cooper's character waits till the film's halfway point to begin to try understanding the drug and how he can assure himself a way to safely continue a supply and a way to make it safer. If I were turned into a super-genius, that would be my first priority. I suppose if he had tried this earlier, we wouldn't have a movie filled with the entertainment of watching someone exercise the a new superpower level of intelligence for his own gratification.

This movie also has the gorgeous Abbie Cornish as Cooper's girlfriend. It is also the first decent movie for which Robert De Niro has contributed himself to in a long time.

The director is Neil Burger, who made another engaging film called The Illusionist, which also had a conclusion that felt kind of weak. He seems to be a director who insists on extreme stylization that would be distracting in most cases but tends to lend itself to the subject he's attached it to. He just needs to work with a screenwriter who knows how to end a film and he may make a masterpiece.

Lucy

**1/2 out of ****

Like most Luc Besson movies, Lucy is violent, pretentious and stupid. However, like the best of his films, it is also imaginative and thrilling. I was insulted by its bad taste and moronic foundation, but I won’t deny that it often triggered the section of my brain, which entertains guilty pleasures.

The story centers on a mid-twenties American student named Lucy, played by Scarlett Johansson. She is studying abroad in Taiwan and unfortunate circumstances lead her to be forced against her will into a drug-smuggling operation for a new dangerous synthetic substance. The drug packages are concealed through surgical implantation but Lucy’s package is punctured. The drug leaks into her system revealing its effects to be of such a dramatic enhancement of the mind and nervous system, that she becomes a super-being.

So, why did Lucy’s unexpected accident create the first super human, when it could have happened to any test subject in the lab where it was invented? This is a pretty basic curiosity but the movie doesn’t seem interested in addressing it.

Sadly, it doesn’t take long for Lucy to become laugh-worthy as its science-fiction plot is aided by none-other than the go-to story exposition man himself, Morgan Freeman, who is seen delivering a lecture on the human brain -filled with the most hilarious pseudo-science one could imagine.

I’m almost tempted to praise this film for being a return to form for an artist who hasn’t directed a fun movie since his amazing, The Fifth Element. While responsible for writing and producing a few successful action films, including The Transporter and Taken, Besson only sits in the director’s chair occasionally. Until Lucy, I felt as though he’d lost touch with a signature tone, which made his earlier films like La Femme Nikita and Léon: The Professional so beautiful. After watching his embarrassingly unfunny dark comedy, The Family, last year, I felt like he was washed-up.

The film’s strength is undeniably at its beginning, which contains contains everything I’ve missed about his work. A beautiful young woman is at the mercy of powerful men who are unprepared for the monster they will unleash. Johansson’s work is in the tradition of Anne Parillaud, Natalie Portman and Milla Jovovich -all females who brought emotional weight to Besson’s films. The film’s mobster villain, played by Min Sik Choi (star of the original Oldboy) brings an intimidating level of sadism through his screen presence alone.

Eric Serra’s score of ambient orchestral and electronic sounds seduces us into the film’s dark trippy fantasy. Thierry Arbogast’s cinematography follows the action and stages the effects delicately while capturing his signature symmetrical shots.

I am congratulating Besson and his collaborators for achieving a style, which has been long-desired on my part. It is the film’s substance that puts the whole project to shame. The movie has some very cool sequences, but the further it moves along, the more its ideas seem like half-baked rip-offs from other films.

As it got close to the end, I started to hypothesize that Besson’s script was achieved by watching Limitless, Altered States, Crank, The Tree of Life, The Matrix, Scanners, Akira and the very recent but too-similar Transcendence. After this eighteen-hour movie binge, he fell asleep, had a Scarlett Johansson wet dream and started writing Lucy when he awoke.

This movie proposes through a vague understanding, that the average human being uses only ten-percent of their brain’s capacity. I think it takes even less brain power to know that Lucy is ridiculous.