The Details

Limitless

Bradley Cooper, Abbie Cornish, Robert De Niro

Directed by Neil Burger

Rated PG-13

Beyond the Weekly

Limitless

IMDb: Limitless

Rotten Tomatoes: Limitless

Most of today’s sci-fi movies basically consist of fighting and chasing, set in outer space or involving aliens. A select few contain actual ideas, and of those, even fewer pull them off with the right touch, and without losing sight of the idea in favor of likable characters. Happily, Neil Burger’s Limitless is one of those. Adapted from a novel by Alan Glynn, it’s more of a bubblegum genre movie than a masterpiece, but it’s far more inventive than Burger’s The Illusionist, and it’s a perfect little pill of escapism. Bradley Cooper stars—a nice combination of smarmy and charming—as loser writer Eddie Morra, who comes across a pill that bestows upon its user extraordinary levels of clarity, concentration and knowledge. This of course leads to encounters with loan sharks, gangsters and Wall Street thugs. Among Burger’s more effective head-trip tricks, we get a simple, effective lighting scheme, as well as a dazzling 18-hour blackout