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Movie review: Limitless
ROBERT DENIRO and BRADLEY COOPER star in Limitless, a film that opened this past week.
‘Limitless’ Has Some Kick For A Dopey Film
By Maggie Scott
The straight dope on the new thriller Limitless is that it’s kind of dopey. A slick, sci-fi mix of Lost Weekend and (as one critic noted) Valley of the Dolls, it’s the latest from director Neil Burger (The Illusionist) and writer Leslie Dixon (from the novel by Alan Glynn).
It’s not exactly star-turning material for the attractive Bradley Cooper, who portrays Eddie Morra, first as a mentally-fogged, mooching writer who apparently hasn’t heard of the benefits of gingko and melatonin to jump-start his brain. Then as a man he regretfully realizes that he “came this close to making an impact on the world.” Aimless and depressed when we meet Eddie, it’s no surprise when he takes the bait of a tiny pill Eddie’s ex-brother-in-law promises will help Eddie “access all of his brain,” instead of the usual twenty percent.
With the fateful words, “how much worse can it get?” Eddie opens this pharmaceutical Pandora’s Box and, bingo, the receptors of his brain start popping like the Fourth of July. Suddenly, overnight, he can Nate Burkis his trashed apartment and write enough material for the Great American Novel to make his jaded editor’s jaw drop. The magic pill is NZT 48, selling for $800 a pop; but it wears off.
Desperate to bring back “the enhanced Eddie,” Eddie goes calling on his NZT dealer, only to find him beyond the help of any pill. Taking off with a plastic freezer bag-full of a fix-a-day for a year or more, Eddie is soon making out like all the winners of all the Jeopardy shows ever broadcast. He’s winning at cards, learning the piano in 3 days, speaking in all foreign languages, fighting thugs like Bruce Lee, scoring every woman, making a killing on the stock market, jumping off cliffs, feeling no fear and suffering no shyness.
The papers are calling him a god and trying to figure out whether it’s a “parlor trick” or a “recipe for grandeur.” Eddie does have one delusion: that the loan shark (Andrew Howard) from whom he borrowed $100,000 is not going to want some of the mind magic for himself.
Eventually, Eddie must come down from his high and face the lows of NZT: He can’t account for some of the things happening to him and to others while he’s traveling, not just the fast lane, but the supersonic lane—things as dire as murder. Who is he when he’s under the influence? Others who have gotten hooked on the magic haven’t fared so well—three are dead and the others are sick. And, what’s with the limp Eddie’s suddenly developed? For a while, Eddie manages his side-effects while he tries to barricade himself from the loan shark with an eight-million-dollar armored fortress above the streets of Manhattan and a pair of muscle-bound bodyguards.
Then, there’s the new girl (Abbie Cornish) he’d like to hold on to and the uber-business mogul, Carl van Loon (Robert De Niro) who’s hoping Eddie’s talents can broker a very lucrative merger. Will this modern-day Prometheus get his liver fed on; or, will this better-living-through science user really beat the odds.
While it’s not as compelling as the Faust legend, and there are plenty of plot holes and inconsistencies, Limitless does have a bit of a kick, but the buzz doesn’t last any longer than the closing credits. Rated PG-13 for drug use, violence, sexual content, language.
