Starring Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro. Limitless is the story of struggling New York writer Eddie Morra, who is offered a drug that will unlock the full potential of his brain. With a promising story, interesting concept, strong cast and drawing on inspiration from 70's Manhattan based thrillers. It was understandable that i went into this film with reasonable expectations.
But in the end i was left feeling cheated. To start with on a slightly less minor note there are some pretty pointless camera tricks and visual effects. Upside down puke scene any one impressed? No. Cooper and De Niro also seem to be trying to take there characters to another level, than what has been given to them on the script. You really get the impression there caged in.
But i guess the biggest qualm is unlike such films as The Matrix and most recently Inception, which do a fantastic job of making the impossible seem possible. Limitless does a fantastic job of insulting your intelligence. Some of the more striking examples of this would be the supposed IQ of Mr Morra, claimed to be a 4 digit IQ. You wonder then what a person with an IQ roughly ten times that of Einstein would do.
Well it's not coming up with the next E=mc2 that's for sure. No Mr Morra concerns himself with making money partying and having sex. Noble pursuits indeed but a tad one dimensional i thinks for a man with a 4 digit IQ.
But the drug has allowed him to do one thing more intellectually orientated. To master languages with a perfect accent. How is it then an eastern European ganger consumes the pill does he still speaks broken English but with a higher vocabulary?
Overall this and many other holes, lead to the conclusion they where just throwing out half baked ideas in the vain hope they stick. And it's not as if the driving concept behind all this is bad in it self. Indeed in the right hands it would have a lot of potential to be something more intelligent and profound. Something which as the film went on i kept thinking would be done more justice by Christopher Nolan.
For the most part i was thinking the film was talking about the consequences of drug abuse. The ending however seemed to say that drug addicts are winners. Ether way the potential is there to have made something really poignant, in the right hands. But sadly that will never happen and what we are left with is a limited Limitless.
A film with an ironic title.
