2011 science fiction, dir. Neil Burger, Bradley Cooper, Robert de
Niro: IMDb /
allmovie
Eddie Morra is a struggling writer, until his ex-brother-in-law offers
him a new drug that makes him smarter.
Yes, this does rest on the tired old "you only use 20% of the
brain" myth. But it wouldn't be so very different if it used one of
the mechanisms proposed for real nootropics: Eddie doesn't get
superpowers, he just thinks faster and with better recall. And in fact
this is at last a legitimate use for the blue/orange tinting that's so
prevalent in modern film: blue tint is normal Eddie, orange tint is
boosted Eddie.
Other visual effects abound: the shortening of focal length to
represent a wider field of vision is perhaps a little heavy-handed,
and an "infinite zoom" through a series of locations doesn't really
add much although it's pretty, but a ceiling that turns into a
split-flap display board does usefully suggest a new way of looking at
the world.
Plotting is less effective: having decided to talk about the world's
most intelligent person, the script doesn't really know what to do
with him. He decides that to achieve anything significant (not least a
continued supply of the drug, after the ex-brother-in-law is murdered)
he'll need money; fair enough. He can't get it from a bank, so he goes
to a loan shark. But he says right then: he's quintupled his money
four days in a row. Starting with the $800 he had, a mere three days
of that would be enough to get him the $100,000 he claims to need. And
once he's got the money, he apparently forgets to pay back the loan
shark, something he ought to be able to do effortlessly after only a
day or two of trading at most, even though he's spending all his time
boosted and with perfect recall. This just doesn't work, any more than
retaining a fat wad of cash and pills after being taken for
questioning from a murder scene would work.
(And this isn't a Hollywood addition to bring in some action; in the
novel on which this was based, The Dark Fields by Alan Glynn, it's
one of the main elements of the plot. Another, which is dropped here
without resolution, is whether Eddie did in fact kill the woman he
dimly remembers having had sex with during a fugue state. I don't
think I'm going to read the book.)
The more interesting part to me is what Eddie does with his new
mind, which turns out to be "run for Senator". That's not the answer
I'd come up with: more like, make enough money to buy some serious
privacy, and then (being the smartest guy in the world and therefore
the person with the best chance of success) work all-out at
replicating the drug and dealing with the side effects. Once that's
assured, start making the world a better place, both with technical
solutions for things like cheap water purification and by bribing
politicians with the drug (giving them a version that makes them a bit
smarter than everyone else, but not as smart as me). That's a story
I'd have preferred to see, about how humanity changes when it can
think better, and I've thought that up in a few minutes while writing
this review, not in however many months it took to write the
screenplay.
Eddie never does find out where the drug originally came from, and
while some other people turn out to have had access to it, their
supply has dried up too. This isn't that sort of story; it's more
about what sort of person one becomes when one is landed with huge
powers. The trick is that almost anyone vaguely good would be a better
person if they suddenly got smarter and could do more about it; why
not give the drug to someone who's really smart already? What is meant
to make Eddie the hero of this story is that he's a really good
person already; and Bradley Cooper just about pulls it off. (And I
have a low tolerance for "manchild slacker makes good" as a concept,
so he has to be a pretty good actor to make that work for me.)
The only other actor with a major role is de Niro, who can of course
do "vaguely sinister tycoon" in his sleep, but never really inspires.
Abbie Cornish has a very small part as Eddie's girlfriend, who leaves
him in the opening scene, comes back when he sorts his life out a bit,
and has one really good scene when she has to take the drug herself to
escape from a hit-man.
In the end: eh, well, it's OK. But it did inspire a TV series that was
rather better.
Comments on this post are now closed. If you have particular grounds for adding a late comment, comment on a more recent post quoting the URL of this one.