LIMITLESS- Review

After the last few weeks of bombardment from Battle Los Angeles and No Strings Attached, a quick fix of intelligence sounds just as appealing to me as it does to Bradley Cooper's character in the new sci-fi thriller Limitless. Chuck in the fact that he's a struggling writer who quickly gets stressed out when more stuff comes into his life, and it could have been made for me.

Eddie is our hero's name, and it's purely by chance that he's fixed up with an experimental drug called NZT, by his scummy ex-brother-in-law. NZT is a transparent tablet, about the size of an aspirin, but its consumption stimulates the receptors of the human brain and boosts the body's access to its potential. Eddie begins quaffing pills right away, little realising the price of his newfound intelligence.

For a while, Limitless was reminding me of Fight Club, in places replicating that film's dark humour, mode of storytelling, and overwhelming righteous anger at The Way Things Are. Certainly, it is to Bradley Cooper what Fight Club was to Brad Pitt, giving Cooper a chance to really work his acting chops and open him up to a second appraisal after the frat comedies and romcoms he's made his name in. And while we're talking about Cooper, I was very impressed at how he convinced me as a loser just as much as he convinced as the successful and handsome bloke he really is, later on in the film. But it took a while longer for me to twig exactly what the film reminded me of as a whole, and that's Unbreakable.

NZT effectively makes Eddie into a man of superhuman intelligence, not only able to recall everything he has ever learned and apply it to his current life but also capable of learning new things at an exponential rate. If they'd wanted to take it that way, the filmmakers could have made this a superhero origin story. But while Bruce Willis' character in Unbreakable was a suburban Superman, his invulnerability seemingly natural, Eddie's powers are fuelled by narcotics, but more pertinently, using hypothetical science that messes with nature, in the view of fuddy-duddy conservative Hollywood.

So it's a Faustian tale, and thusly, the pitfalls of addiction are thoroughly examined. As you might expect of a pill sourced from a random acquaintance with a history of being an unreliable drug dealing bastard, it has chemical faults that manifest themselves in the course of Eddie's addiction, but that's not all. The title is Limitless, but Eddie's intellectual omnipotence isn't immune to other people. While you can anticipate the greed of others or, as the film puts it, the human tendency to overreach, you can't always stop external forces from messing up your life.

Director Neil Burger pulls off a great bit of visual storytelling in representing Eddie's addiction. In the beginning of the story, the visuals are bleached, drab and milky. When Eddie first swallows that clear pill and lets it take effect, the world brightens up, illuminated by sunshine and broadened by a wide-angle lens that allows him to see everything in front of him. In a period where he goes cold turkey, it's drab and milky again, but still clear. And once he's fixed up again, that sunshine starts to look awful bright. Blinding, even. The effects don't change, but the context does, and it's very clever stuff.

But unfortunately, the limits of the film aren't just within the story- they're outside of it too, in the script and in the production. With a great head of momentum building between Eddie's successes and his addiction to the drug, the film ultimately doesn't have enough in it to give us a strong conclusion. It does that thing that annoyed me in The Adjustment Bureau, of jumping forward in time, but these scenes feels after the fact in the wake of the climactic scenes preceding it. As is human nature then, the film overreaches.

This is where the comedown begins. You gradually begin to realise that the film isn't as clever as it thinks, or indeed, as clever as you thought up until that point. The high of the earlier part of the film begins to dissipate, and coming down allows you to realise, as you plummet towards the credits and then walk out of the cinema, that you can't account for certain plotholes. Is that subplot really not going to come back? Is that really it for that character? Wait, what was that all about? And one of the early highlights of the movie, when Eddie outright asks the audience what they would do in his situation, given the risk, is negated by the way the film closes the book on any persistent ambiguities about the pros and cons of NZT.

Another recent Faust-inspired movie, Philip Ridley's Heartless, had more heart than the title would suggest. Similarly, Limitless is a good film, but one with more inhibitions than either its title or its pacey swagger would suggest. I was enthralled enough by the premise and Bradley Cooper's performance to give it a rock-solid recommendation, and I stand by that. However, its inconsistencies and its closed-minded conclusion mean that ironically, it's a film for which you might need to leave your brain at the door, if only to avoid the subsequent comedown.

Limitless is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen Limitless, why not share your comments below? And yes, I know Robert DeNiro was in this too. When he gives an interesting performance, I'll have something to say.

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU- Review

In the echelons of inaccurate pull-quotes, there shall be a special place for the Total Film assessment of the snappily titled sci-fi romance, The Adjustment Bureau, which appears on the poster and in many of the TV spots. Total Film called it "Bourne Meets Inception", when it's not really like either of those things, but hey, we're in a week where everything is "Bourne Meets" something or other.

So, what The Adjustment Bureau is really like is the Phillip K. Dick story from which it was inspired. David is a Congressman who looks set for a meteoric rise in the world of politics. He has a chance encounter with a dancer called Elise, and he's instantly smitten. However, when he meets her again a short while later, a powerful force interferes. A bureau of men in hats and suits posit that David and Elise were never meant to meet again, and they try their utmost to rectify the course of the plan that is rapidly unravelling as this couple fall deeper and deeper in love.

If we have to compare The Adjustment Bureau to something other than what it actually is, which is a romantic thriller with an otherworldly and theological concept, the comparison that most immediately struck me while watching it was with A Matter of Life and Death. Particularly in its later movements, the similarities are obvious when you're looking at a film about a couple trying to prove that they're destined to be together, even in the face of a higher force that is trying to divide them.  

A Matter of Life and Death is one of my favourite films of all time, so this film would inevitably suffer from that comparison, but it also means that I enjoyed it quite a lot. The masterstroke as far as this one is concerned is either in the casting or in what the lead actors managed to construct when they were thrown together. Matt Damon and Emily Blunt are on fire in this film, whenever they appear together, with a scorching and yet very charming chemistry that really gets you on side.

However, throughout their extended Meet-Cute scenes, the sci-fi elements are established via these men in hats and suits being rather sinister in what they believe is doing right by David and Elise. In the lower rankings of the titular bureau, you get Anthony Mackie, who's ultimately quite friendly and pragmatic, but further up, you get the more rigid and authoritarian John Slattery. Go higher, and you get Terence "General Zod" Stamp, which gives a sense of the ingrained values of this powerful organisation.

They are the opposing force in what is basically a debate about determinism, and the role of free will. If there's a problem with the film, it is that the rules are too vaguely established. We are intended to follow that the Adjustment Bureau give human beings less individual choice in their own destinies because actual free will is a failed experiment that threw up the Dark Ages, two world wars and the Cuban missile crisis. That doesn't explain how their level of control allows for the current atrocities committed all over the world after those events.

These men work in mysterious ways, which is as much as I'm prepared to say without just spitting it out and telling you what we're meant to figure out ourselves while watching the film. In that framework, I can kind of forgive the film some of its vagaries, not least because it's just a very engaging watch. On the downside, I was less enamored of the abrupt time-skips that were brought in throughout the film, because nothing disrupts the momentum more than a sudden "Three years later". The film doesn't exactly outstay its welcome, but there are surely better and more inventive ways to illustrate a vast leap in the narrative.

The Adjustment Bureau was put back to this month from its original release date last summer, and despite having highly anticipated it for a long time, I can now appreciate the wisdom of that decision. In a relatively quiet month at the cinema, it has room to breathe, rather than being shot out of a cannon as counter-programming to Piranha or The Expendables. It's very easy to like, and slightly harder to dismiss some of its flaws, but crucially, it pitches a compelling romance between Damon and Blunt while working through a passage between romantic thriller and sci-fi parable.

The Adjustment Bureau is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen The Adjustment Bureau, why not share your comments below?

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

Going Down- DEVIL Review

Devil is the first of "The Night Chronicles", three stories conceived by the ever-disintegrating M. Night Shyamalan and then bequeathed to up and coming horror writers/directors. This one opens on a suicide, and according to religious lore, this is an event that gives the Devil a portal into human form, to hunt for the damned who have escaped him.

At some point or another, his host enters a skyscraper and hops into an elevator, which promptly breaks down and traps five people inside. A salesman, a security guard, an old lady, a socialite and a mechanic are stuck with each other- but while they all seem destined for Hell, which of them is the Devil in disguise?

It's a matter of public record that Shyamalan isn't exactly living up to his initial potential. All of that came to a head in The Last Airbender, resulting in widespread reports of people audibly groaning at the trailer for Devil when it pronounced itself as "a new nightmare from the mind of M. Night Shyamalan." Funnily enough, for a director once heralded as the new Hitchcock, this story makes for the most Hitchcockian film his name has been attached to, and he didn't even direct it.

Its central gimmick is reminiscent of something like Lifeboat, when it really needs the execution of something like Rope. Some small smidgen of suspense would be massively appreciated in a film that made me feel like I was watching it underwater. There are jump scares and plot twists and emotional moments, but none of them have any impact whatsoever, hence the feeling of being underwater.

Mostly, the detachment comes from the fact that we exit the elevator to show other characters rather than zeroing in on our trapped Satanic suspects. Indeed, the main character is arguably a detective who watches helplessly. He's played by Chris Messina, who gives the best performance in the film despite being saddled with the most predictable backstory. There's a great slimy turn from Geoffrey Arend too, but it's really nothing to remark upon.

The screenwriting credit on this one goes to Brian Nelson, who previously wrote Hard Candy. This makes me, like many others, call shenanigans on how much Shyamalan actually did. The script is full of his tics as a filmmaker- the stuff that's annoyed us in every single one of his films since Signs. In particular, the hilarity is ramped up by the presence of a Hispanic security guard who first brings up portents of "el diablo", seeing evil in the way a piece of toast lands on the carpet. M. Night almost certainly polished the script, even if in his case that means spitting on it and trying to shine it with the hem of his shirt.

What's that thing, you ask? Not a clue. And I've SEEN the film.

It's all just Fine, really. Fine with a capital F, because I am consciously damning the film with faint praise to say that it's merely fine, and some may yet find the same kind of entertainment they did in The Happening, for unintentional laughs. It ambles along without any tension or self-awareness, and many of its cheap scares don't even make any sense in the final resolution. Did something bite her? What was that behind the security guard? These are just some of the questions Devil will raise and then leave you to forget about on the way home.

Many of the film's establishing shots are upside down, which oddly enough reflects Shyamalan's skewed perspective on filmmaking these days. Devil ends up being an utterly inoffensive and smaller-scale version of Ten Little Indians, despite having the potential to be a lot more memorable and interesting. It's no reflection on director John Erick Dowdle, but on a story that is stretched even at 80 minutes, which would be more suited to a Twilight Zone episode, or a slot in an anthology horror film. I'd say it's really more of a thriller than a horror film, but then where are all the thrills?

Devil is now playing in cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen Devil, why not leave a comment on the film and/or my review? If you've recently dropped toast with the jelly facing down, I'd advise you not to call a priest or an exorcist or the Ghostbusters- no one really acts like the characters Shyamalan creates.

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

Look, Ma! Three Hands!

As something of a regular disclaimer, it's only my opinion here- others are available. As ever, mild spoilers may occur in the process of reviewing, but never so far as to spoil any major plot developments.

A dramatic three-hander, The Disappearance of Alice Creed is showing in selected cinemas this week, bringing a frequently used theatre structure in for a rare outing on the big screen. And I also saw Date Night. What? Yeah, ok, so there's no pithy connection going on except that Date Night is kind of a thriller, in the loosest sense of the word, i.e. it's not. Convergence aside, these are the films, here are my reviews.
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Date Night finds a put-upon married couple, Phil and Claire Foster, desperately trying to reignite the spark in their relationship. He spends all day in a crap job at the tax office while she tries to sell real estate to dunderheads, and both are distracted by looking after their young kids. So in a change from their regular date nights, they sneak into a swanky restaurant by stealing another couple's reservations, and end up on the run for their lives as they're mistaken for thieves by a criminal gang.

Let's imagine for a moment that Hugh Grant plays Phil and Sarah Jessica Parker plays Claire. Now read that synopsis again. Now you have a fair idea of why Did You Hear About The Morgans? sucked balls. Instead, Date Night boasts the pairing of the two biggest names in American comedy right now, even if it does still have Shaun Levy at the helm. Levy directed the likes of Night at the Museum and Cheaper by the Dozen. With a plot as generic and trodden over as this and a director as pedestrian as Levy, it's easy to see how the film would've been horrible if not for the inspired casting of Steve Carell and Tina Fey.
Look at the other casting, for instance. Mark Wahlberg as Shirtless Man. Common as a cop. Oh, and a lovely turn from Ray Liotta, who hasn't been told he's in a comedy. I feel this film vindicates my view on romantic comedies once again by showing how relatable characters and likable actors can make a humdrum film a lot better. The script for this one is pretty by-numbers, but it's the peerless comic timing of its leads that makes it inherently enjoyable. Although the film later becomes more action-packed than its beginning, I could happily have watched 90 minutes of the Fosters bickering and exhausting each other. This is great comedy, the kind of thing that's missing from a million Jennifer Aniston romcoms that are neither funny nor romantic.

Ladies, Date Night is quite possibly the best film you'll drag a guy to see this year. If you aren't really interested, drag him to see this anyway, because I don't doubt he's going to suffer through Eclipse later in the year if you're so inclined. The action elements are fine, and indeed better than fine in the case of an inspired car chase in the middle that I've never seen done anywhere else before, but Carell and Fey are the heart of the film. I'm dying to see what they could do with a better script than this, so I hope they work together again in the future. Nevertheless, there's enough material to keep you laughing throughout, even if Levy hares off across genres rather than fully building on the leads' chemistry together.

Date Night is now playing in cinemas nationwide.


The difficulty of reviewing The Disappearance of Alice Creed is that it's a film better enjoyed the less you know about it. I can sort of set up the smallest of plot synopses, to say that it centres around Danny and Vic, two criminals who kidnap the heiress of the title and secure her in a dingy flat until their demands are met. Beyond that, I think you're best off finding out for yourself. This review might be brief if I'm trying to skimp on plot information, but I can easily appraise the way the film's assembled. The three hands at work here are Gemma Arterton as Alice, Eddie Marsan as Vic and Martin Compston as Danny, and that they're all pretty bloody brilliant.

Of Arterton in particular, I haven't been the most positive reviewer. In Quantum of Solace, I said she was "eye candy amidst a more angsty and emotionally interesting film." Not by any fault of her own, her biggest films have tended to shove her into this role- see also the recent Clash of the Titans remake. Here, she's given a chance to truly announce herself as a terrific young actress as Alice. No matter what you'd believe from the subject matter, she's a million miles from the damsel in distress she became in those other films. Complementing her performance are her co-stars, with a fearsome Marsan and a mysterious Compston each playing somewhat mercurial characters, albeit in different ways.
Their dynamic is obviously what The Disappearance of Alice Creed hangs on, and the production design brings forward their performances rather than drawing your attention to the one set on which most of the film takes place- the claustrophobic atmosphere of a flat-turned-fortress that serves as both a dungeon for Alice and a domesticated safehouse for her captors. Within this unknown environment, the audience is regularly subjected to twists, reversals and reveals that give the film regular shots of energy. It all comes together with writer-director J Blakeson's superb work to make for an unpredictable thriller that's often unbearably tense. Not Hurt Locker-brand tension, but there's an inevitability about the film that's almost as inescapable as the flat it's largely set in.

It keeps up a head of steam in the wake of several revelatory twists in the first and second acts, but it doesn't quite come to the knockout blow that you might expect. That's the only appreciable flaw I can find with The Disappearance of Alice Creed. Rejecting the traditions of kidnap thrillers, it's a gripping and highly intelligent debut for Blakeson, and it finally announces Gemma Arterton for her acting talents and not her looks. The three actors are all terrific, and this film is never anything less than gripping. Seek it out if the monolith of Iron Man 2 hasn't entirely obscured the film's limited release- this is definitely not a film that deserves to disappear.

The Disappearance of Alice Creed is now playing in selected cinemas nationwide. You can find a longer (still spoiler-free) review from me at Den of Geek.
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If you've seen Date Night or The Disappearance of Alice Creed, or you just want to sign up in advance for my "I Was Dragged To See Eclipse" support group, why not comment below?

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.