Limitless

Limitless is a good old-fashioned B movie with an up-and-coming near-the-top actor (Bradley Cooper) and director (Neil Burger).

Yale-grad Burger made his mark as a writer-director in 2002 with a mockumentary, Interview with the Assassin, telling a clever fiction of JFK's "second" assassin. Four years later, Burger had worked with some of Hollywood's top talents, directing his own screenplay adaptation of a Steven Millhauser short story, The Illusionist. Starring Edward Norton and Paul Giamatti, it won many nominations and awards for its composer (Philip Glass), costume designer (Ngila Dickson), lead actress (Jessica Biel) and cinematographer Dick Pope, (the British long-time associate of Mike Leigh also collecting his first Oscar nod).

Burger's Iraq-veterans comedy, The Lucky Ones (2008), co-written by him, had a less stellar line-up (Rachel McAdams, Tim Robbins and Michael Pena) and didn't win box office or award kudos. Maybe that was why he was next given a directing-only job, where the irony is that his zoom-along kinetic imagery is such refreshing cinema it makes the screenplay by Leslie (Hairspray update) Dixon seem a flimsy framework. The talent of a Burger as a co-writer was needed for the adaptation of the first (2001) novel, The Dark Fields, by Irish writer Alan Glynn. He'd followed the scifi-reality path well-trodden by Philip Dick, imagining a drug that would enable a man to have instant access to all global knowledge, a "limitless" ability to know everything, be a real stock exchange master of the world, and learn any foreign language.

In such supernatural fairy tales, the drug will have unpleasant side-effects (great excuses for a director to show off technical skills with multiple zoom and fish-eye lenses). There will also be a scheming corporate master-mind (another excuse for Robert De Niro to sell his talent for sweet-talking nastiness) and cruel gangsters (Russian, of course). Throw in a long-suffering girlfriend and an addicted ex-wife, for limited female attractions, and the formulaic product just needs its charismatic male lead.

Until now, Bradley Cooper had usually been type-cast as a comic co-lead actor, adding a handsome lack of depth to the very shallow Hangover franchise and Sandra Bullock's All About Steve. The TV series veteran (Alias, Nip/Tuck) sensibly invested his own capital in the highly profitable movie, his first production venture. Cooper will not be a Cruise but, with four other features due out in the next two years (one with De Niro as his supporting co-star again), he's a potential Cage. His bank account won't care if it's damned with such faint praise.