Everybody loves a winner. We love winners so much, we will tolerate pretty much anything from them. Chris Brown's album is top 5 on iTunes despite violent outbursts in dressing rooms and on a women's face. Charlie Sheen had a drug fueled, manic depressive episode on National TV, and booked a 22-date speaking tour with a $100,000 per night guarantee on the back of it. Side note: does anybody find it odd that Good Morning America has become the nexus point for all things terrible and bizarre? Brown, Sheen and Rebecca Black all in a month's time? More proof that Andrea Canning is indeed Beelzebub.

We don't care if he stepped on a thousand necks to get there, we love the guy on top of the pile. And there is no one in Hollywood who embodies the winner more than Bradley Cooper. If you've read my blog over the years, you'll know about my hatred for The Hangover, and dear ol Brad is the reason why. I want to be clear here: I have nothing against this man personally. I have never met Mr. Cooper and I'm sure he's lovely. In fact I bet if we started hanging out in a bar, I'd wanna be his best friend inside 15 minutes. He could steal the woman off my arm and I'd be totally cool with it, chalk it up to "taking a hit for the team". Cooper oozes a learned charisma, the funny, self-aware yet irreverent everyman every guy sees themselves as. Even his rise to fame is likable: after paying his dues with bit parts on Sex & The City and Law & Order for the better part of a decade, he gets a break in Wedding Crashers, portraying a douche bag to perfection. He then leapfrogs to bona-fide leading man status in just 5 short years. The man is a born winner.

I have one problem with this - winners are dickheads.

Now I don't want this to come off as veiled jealously (even if it is), but other than being good at everything he does, having a slightly oversized nose and a perfect abdomen, why should we care about Bradley Cooper? There is nothing vulnerable or genuine about this guy at all. Never since the invention of Matthew McConuaghey has there been an actor so unwilling to appear weak. All the coolest guys in Cinema - Bogart, Brando, Dean, McQueen, Nicholson - they all had a wild unpredictability. They weren't afraid of anything, even being afraid. Mr. Cooper is just some dude who always comes out on top. Put this guy in a movie about a drug that lets you access the 90% of your brain you don't use, and all you've got is a story about winner who wins. Boring. 

It's fun to watch somebody be really good at things for 25 minutes exactly. I still don't know how they filled up the other 80. The movie starts out with Brad as a loser (believe it or not I liked him a little here), but he quickly gets hold of a self-improvement strand of MDMA and learns languages, writes novels, beats the stock market, even becomes a kung-fu master. Yes this was as stupid to watch on screen as it reads.

There are a few clever plot twists, and Abbie Cornish is very sexy, but overall this movie was silly. Robert DeNiro once again pioneers a form of acting where it's unclear if he's aware he's in a movie, let alone speaking to other human beings. I have a theory he films all his scenes from a hologram booth in his TriBeCa loft. File this under Netflix/Lovefilm along with Tiger Blood, the video for Forever, and Season 1 of Two and Half Men now that we've seen Sheen lose his marbles. Winning.