Limitless

I’m a sucker for superhuman stuff. The more believable it is the better, in most cases. There’s no super-strength or x-ray vision here, just brain stuff, so it’s probably one of the most plausible films of this variety that I’ve seen. However, the basis of the conceit (we can only access 20% of our brains) is kind of BS, so that along with a bunch of other stuff breaks it a bit. Still, it was well done enough for me to enjoy most of it.

The story is that Brad Cooper is a mooching writer who doesn’t write and then starts taking drugs to get smart. Then of course the drugs start taking their toll as they do, driving him a bit mad and making his new life as a Wall Street man a bit difficult. It’s a semi-good picture of the effects of addiction for what it is. This drug in particular starts making your lose time, and then once withdrawal hits you get sick and probably die. The need to feed his addiction leads Brad to do things that nearly get him killed anyway several times, but the pros of the drug somehow outweigh the cons, allowing him to stay one step ahead of the baddies.

There are some pretty cool visual tricks, like the infinite-hallway thing and color-pallet changes according the mental state of the characters, the acting is in general pretty cool, and again I like superhuman stuff. However, this movie has problems. The very extensive use of voiceovers is one. While it’s probably necessary to convey what’s going on in Brad’s heightened mind, I think we could have done without that much explanation. The bit that bugged me the most though was the end, in that the message we get from this story is that drugs can be good and improve your life if you can handle them right. Going into it I thought the whole “you’re probably going to die” thing would be more predictive of the conclusion, but I guess we just had to have a happy ending.

Not a bad movie but I wouldn’t say you need to see it really.