15 Years Ago, Bradley Cooper Made The Right Kind Of Dumb Sci-Fi Movie

It may not be true that humans only use 10% of their brains, but at this point, the nonsensical urban legend has probably fueled more than 10% of our pop culture. It’s popped up to explain plot points in movies ranging from Inception to Flight of the Navigator, not to mention all sorts of old novels, comic books, and TV shows.

Most infamously, the silly trope is crucial to 2014’s Lucy, which sees Scarlett Johansson discover that the other 90% of her brain can be used to kick everyone’s ass. Three years before Lucy, though, and 15 years ago today, Limitless saw Bradley Cooper unlock his latent mental capacity, then use his newfound intellect to live the kind of life every Red Bull-chugging frat boy dreams of.

Like whatever Lucy’s main character was called, Cooper’s Eddie Morra stumbles across an experimental substance, here called NZT-48, and discovered after a chance encounter with his sleezy ex-brother-in-law. But rather than evolving into a telekinetic superbeing who can see through time like Johansson, Morra’s first act is to so impress his landlord’s shrew wife that they simply must bang it out.

While NZT-48 is portrayed as a generalized mood and motivation booster, its biggest benefit is that it provides perfect recall — if you half-watched a PBS documentary while doing dishes a quarter-century ago, you’ll be able to regurgitate everything Ken Burns had to say about jazz (the adulterous wife is wooed by the suddenly articulate Morra’s help with a law school paper). After getting laid, Morra uses his newfound powers to quickly finish a novel he was stuck on, and then, in Limitless’ most realistic twist, he grows smart enough to realize that writing for a living is a dead end and pivots to a career in finance.

What follows is a thriller that’s disappointingly straightforward for such a silly premise, yet still has enough fun with itself that it’s hard not to have a good time along with it. Morra’s overnight stock market wizardry attracts the attention of telecom tycoon Carl Van Loon (Robert De Niro), who recruits Morra to oversee a merger that makes Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. look like small potatoes. Days after we’re introduced to Morra as a deadbeat living in squalor, he’s pulling on the threads of corporate history.

But Morra’s supply of NZT is limited, and its downsides include potentially fatal withdrawal symptoms. There’s also the fact that Morra’s personal fortune was built with a loan from a sketchy gangster, who gets his hands on one of Morra’s pills and presses him for more. All of this leads to action, intrigue, and an underwhelmingly straightforward finale that lands on “abusing substances is awesome and will work out just fine in the end.” This is a movie that flirts with a message about hubris and unforeseen consequences, then backs away as though themes are scary.

That the world’s smartest man can only think of using his intellect to party, screw, and drive fast cars is arguably a failure of imagination, and makes Limitless feel like it should have been called Axe Body Spray for Algernon (its actual source material, author Alan Glynn’s The Dark Fields, gets significantly darker). Then again, there’s no shortage of contemporary young men trying to hack their way to effortless money and women, and if Morra were a modern character, he could’ve been introduced trying to get ChatGPT to deliver his hookup lines and write his book for him. That Morra is handed the world and can only think of his place in it might actually be Limitless’ smartest insight.

Either way, Limitless is inventive enough on the margins to remain worth the semi-discerning sci-fi fan’s time. Morra’s world is bright and shiny when he’s on IQ uppers, but when he crashes, the color palette collapses along with him. Cooper brings a swaggy charm to his brainy bro, and his harried energy helps sell the movie’s unexpected comedic beats. Most fittingly, Limitless’ has an action beat so stupid yet so brilliant that it would be criminal to spoil it here.

Fifteen years on, is Limitless the best story about using substances to unlock a dizzying intellect? Good lord, no (that honor belongs to Ted Chiang’s “Understand,” which Gus Van Sant is supposedly developing into a TV show). Is it, however, the most fun? Yeah, probably. Back in 2011, some critics made the reasonable argument that Limitless should have been much smarter than it is. But at least we got a movie that’s the right kind of stupid.

Limitless is streaming on Prime Video.