Limitless – Review
How would life be if you had the world at your disposal? What would you do with yourself if you were head and shoulders above and beyond the competition? Live the good life? Change the world? How differently would you behave compared to now? Would you even be recognizable as the same person if you had no limits? Those are the premises for the film Limitless which explores what that would be like.
Bradley Cooper is all the rage now. Ever since The Hangover exploded he’s been popping up all over the place. Limitless poses a number of interesting questions. It begins with the failed premise that humans only use a small portion of their brain and that a magic little pill can allow full use of your brain. Well, this explanation is unfortunate because the notion that we only use a small part of our brain is utterly false. Luckily we can just sort of move beyond that and imagine the premise that you could suddenly become much smarter, and much more aware of everything without having to pinpoint exactly how that would be possible.
The path that Bradley Cooper chose to follow seems like a plausible one. A man who has been down in the slumps for quite some time immediately gets to work bettering his situation. Once he realizes that there truly are not any limits in front of him he begins to conjecture about things bigger than financial gain and he begins thinking of what kind of mark he can make on the world.
Unfortunately there were a number of semi-bizarre scenes that just didn’t jive well. The most egregious incident was the scene towards the end of the film where Bradley Cooper’s only chance for survival is to get a new fix of his wonder drug and the last of the wonder drug was just injected into the person he just killed. Oh the drama! Whatever will he do? Well, he could start drinking that guy’s blood that’s pooling on the ground. That’ll give him his super powers. Plus, don’t even get me started on the fact that the dose the guy injected into himself would be distributed throughout his bloodstream. So for Bradley Cooper to get the same level of kick he would technically have to drink all of that guy’s blood. If he could get a wonderful kick from a few tiny sips, he could have been cutting each pill into hundreds of pieces.
Another kind of strange moment is what happened with his girlfriend. The whole episode where she goes off to get the pills, ends up taking one, successfully fights off the bad guy, and doesn’t immediately decide to walk away from the guy is very bizarre. The very end of the movie kind of irked me a bit as well. He has that little exchange with Robert De Niro about how he’s not on the pill any more, but maybe he is, and then the movie ends. I just didn’t find myself caring enough to sit and postulate about what was actually going on. I just wanted to know how the movie ended. That’s not to say it was a bad movie. I enjoyed it. It was a very novel idea that definitely brings up a lot of interesting questions. It was just in the final execution that some things got a big wonky.
