LIMITLESS, a review by VirtualScot
LIMITLESS 
The most ironic film title of all time?Directed by Neil Burger, the director of mystery magician drama The Illusionist. And 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 a few superfluous stylistic visual choices and camera tricks. Pointless nonsense that try's and fails to be artistic, and sticks out like a sore thumb. The best example of this being in a scene where we witness Mr Morra puking on the side walk, the camera flips upside down for a well upside down puke shot.
I shrug my shoulders and give a short sardonic laugh at what i just witnessed. Is your intent Mr Burger to try and convey the mind alternating affects of this drug? Or is it to say look at me see how arty i'am, I'm going for the latter. This aside though the direction is good and everything develops at a reasonable pace most of the time, and the editing is solid.
Cooper and De Niro do a good job as well with there roles, but are ultimately limited. It could not be more obvious through out the film they are trying to take there characters to another level, than what the writers had given to them on the script. Making it at times a bit uncomfortable to watch.
The biggest qualm however with Limitless though, is unlike such films as The Matrix and more recently Inception. Which do a fantastic job of making the impossible seem plausible. 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.
As 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.
(From Watch, Absorb and Deconstruct: A Saga of Film Watching by Virtual Scot on April 1st, 2011)
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May 18, 2024, 12:23:44 AM
