We all wish we could be a little smarter, cooler, better. But would you resort to drugs for the ability to access every nook and cranny of your brain? That is the theme of the new psychological mystery, Neil Burger’s Limitless. A story about one man who threatens his own life to make it better. With the exception of rare and somewhat entertaining moments, Limitless could use a drug of its own to reach its full potential.

A down-on-his-luck writer, Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper), is given a designer drug that boosts his brain power to its full potential. He takes the pill without hesitation when he is at the end of his rope and within 30 seconds he a genius. As a result, he manages to write an entire novel in four days, changes from a druggie hobo look to a respectable image, and navigates successfully through the stock market. Since the pill (called NZT) is crucial to his new found success, he becomes extremely dependent on it, as with all drugs and ignores his severe withdrawals, and the criminals tracking his every move. He becomes a hotshot businessman and his new boss, crafty Carl Van Loon (De Niro), will stop at nothing to get Eddie’s brilliant mind to work for him. Now Eddie must stay alive by evading the criminals after him, while keeping a constant dose of NZT.

For Cooper (The Hangover, Wedding Crashers), a dramatic role is pretty alien. If he’s trying to break his comedic shell and become known as a serious actor, this isn’t a good way to do it. I was very surprised with Robert De Niro (Taxi Driver, The Godfather Part I-III, Raging Bull, Goodfellas). He is an iconic legend for me, and he played the role well, as usual, but the fact that he chose to play this particular part is baffling. He’s played the sneaky type before, but this time, it was mainly his squinting face and his thick, New-York accent doing the work. I never expected him to choose such a pointless role. And seriously, what’s up with the name Van Loon? You don’t give Robert De Niro a ridiculous name like that.

A lot of things bothered me about the movie. Eddie gets the pills of NZT in a small Ziploc, yet within 14 months that little baggie happened to contain about 450 pills. And why, why, would they make a Russian the bad guy again? We get it: Russia bad; America good. He could have at least tried to make the accent believable instead of switching around from a vulgar Brooklyn to a syrup-mouthed illiterate. Little details can make or break the movie, and these made shattered it. Some particular lines were pretty funny, though, like “I discovered Google recently.” The visuals made my head spin. I felt like they put too much effort into making the images kaleidescope and not enough effort into the story.

Limitless is the kind of movie you can only watch properly in a movie theater; it will never be as good on a regular TV at home. It was fun to watch sometimes, and made you think about Eddie’s choices. Mostly it made my head hurt, since there were so many twists and turns in the storyline. It was very unpredictable until about 10 seconds before something remotely interesting happened. Usually I can watch something over and over again and not get bored with it. With Limitless, on the other hand, I just don’t want to watch this again. It makes me wish I had a pill to make me smart enough not to step into the movie theater.

Limitless is rated PG-13