Police, Adjective

What Hollywood can't do: make a cop movie without guns. There has to be a detective gone rogue, an undercover operative struggling with his allegiances, and at least one seasoned veteran too cynical to care. Brooklyn's Finest was horrible.

On the other side of the Romance language-speaking world, Cristi (Dragos Bucur) is on a fool's errand in Corneliou Porumboiu's Police, Adjective. Nevermind this gun, Cristi also lacks a badge - he might as well be the lackey to a dubious private detective. Freezing, he follows the kid the school, waits around, then examines the cigarette butts left behind for traces of THC. After a meager bowl of soup with some day old bread, it's back to the office to write a detailed report on the day's events. A questionable informant has put Cristi onto the kid, telling him he's distributing to several others in the high school, but after thorough investigation, there's little evidence to support this claim. Nevertheless, Cristi tries his hardest, working tirelessly despite the slogging bureaucracy of post-Cold War Romania to build the case.

In the midst of this slow work, Cristi gets to thinking about the meaning of things, specifically right and wrong. He develops misgivings about ruining a young man for life over a little grass. The mirror-image of the last major Romanian hit, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, Porombiou's film isn't an exercise in suspense, but rather meditation. Cristi eats soup. Cristi goes for a beer. Cristi talks to his girlfriend about the lyrics of a pop song. And all the while, the following. And all the while, the paperwork. Only the drab setting reminds us that we're in a world of moral decay - the actions themselves lack any inherent drama or atmosphere.

Fitting then that the grand finale of Police, Adjective consists of Cristi's superior reading out of a dictionary for upwards of three minutes, as the camera stares objectively ahead. Not only is there no room for Cristi's moral hemming and hawing within the state bureaucracy - there's no space for humanity of any kind. As the chief flips from the definition of police (ironically, it's the verb he finds most important) back to the L section where, apparently in all Romance languages, we find law, Cristi is reminded of what he is - not Dirty Harry, just a clerk keeping clean the ledger of the state.

American cop movies exploit what we find immediately interesting about the profession - they get to carry a gun, and they uphold the ideas of right and wrong. Maybe once in a while this does happen, a dashing Michael Douglas comes across a sexy serial killer, or Al Pacino tries to fight city hall. But most of the time, cops are the extras in those films, writing traffic tickets, directing traffic, and occasionally busting some petty drug users down to size. The screenwriters and pulp novelists can romanticize this business all they want, but turn back to the reference book, and it's a lonely guy walking a lonely beat, bored out of his mind and powerless to change the system.

Limitless

In a move seemed to prepare our stomachs for the roller-coaster ride to follow, Limitless opens with a high speed pan up the face of an endless high-rise, stopping on a well-dressed Edward Morra (Bradley Cooper), about to fling himself from his 8.5 million dollar penthouse's balcony. In the classic "I had it all, but..." formula, it is customary to start at some point in the third act, when the character is facing death or suicide. In Eddie's case, it's both. In a canny voiceover that could only be the conception of a failed writer, Eddie tells us despite having a 4-digit IQ, he must have missed something, because he's about to meet his end. A second later, we're hurled back down to the streets of midtown Manhattan, where the camera takes a sharp left turn and hurtles through about 200 vertiginous zoom-ins that give us the feeling of flying directly into a two dimensional space. Wait, is this movie about drugs?

If any of that reminds you of Fight Club, you're not far off. Limitless is another male-fantasy movie about a sad sack who gets a once in a lifetime opportunity to realize his dreams. Only this time, he isn't schizophrenic. Eddie was once a writer, the only kind of person who can have a shaggy unkempt appearance "without having a drug or alcohol problem" (ha, ha). Despite telling us this, we soon learn he is a recovering addict, and a run-in with a former dealer soon has him hooked on a new drug called NZT, or "the clear". NZT doesn't get you stoned or make you feel good all over, though - it allows you to access 100% of your brain functionality. We all know what that means guys - Eddie's gonna get laid!

Suddenly he has eagle-eye vision, a photographic memory and a better haircut. Eddie finishes his novel in 4 days, then quickly realizes that money=power, which sends him frantically into the world of finance (After a detour to the South of Spain with a group of available young supermodels). He turns 800 dollar into 2.5 million in three weeks, becomes the toast of Wall Street (oh yeah, there's a touch of Wall Street), and is soon rubbing elbows with Carl Van Loon (Robert DeNiro), a master-of-his-domain type who tries to use Eddie's phenomenal deductive powers to pull off a historic merger.

Writer Leslie Dixon, working from the novel The Dark Fields by Alan Glynn, pulls a nice switch on us - the expectation is that a movie about a prescription drug will eventually lead us to the halls of a shady pharmaceutical company. However, that moment never comes; Eddie's only problems come from people who want more NZT, the drug that makes you a winner. Limitless is a low-budget thriller that arrives in March, when moviegoers aren't looking for moralizing about the beat-to-death concept of Better Living through Chemistry. Eddie lives better, end of story.

So here we have an admitted drug addict falling in love with a whole new high, and we're rooting for him. And that's where the male fantasy aspect of Limitless is so important - director Neil Burger makes us want NZT as much as anyone in the film. In a way, it's more important than the money itself. Even though Eddie very clearly kills a woman and gets away with it, it's no time to cluck our tongues in disapproval. We only wonder: where will he get his next dose? The plot answers maniacally - by drinking it out of a dying man's bloodstream. If that doesn't hit the the nail squarely enough on the head for your liking, a used hypodermic needle lies in frame.

There is no going back to normal for Eddie Morra - he has gone to the very limits of the human mind, stared into the abyss, and smiled. The cheeky epilogue is predictable, but warmly received - he must move on to the next frontier. Unlike Tony Montana, Eddie was not destined to go down in a hail of bullets due to his own hubris. Apparently, the end of his "I had it all, but..." is "soon I would have even more." Basically, if a pill can make you cool, take it.