Movie Review: Limitless

Length of Shower: It was...well...Limitless --So I went to see the movie Limitless with Bradley Cooper and Robert DeNiro the other night and so here is my review of that film.

Limitless was good, for the first three-quarters of the movie.  I liked the concept and how we got there and the guidelines that were set up early in the film.  The idea that a pill could maximize your brain's capacity, speed, and usefulness so that rather than using only 20 percent of our brains we used all 100 percent.  It was a cool concept and idea that was both believable and desirable by this audience member.  So, I bought in.  I watched and even routed for our hero, Bradley Cooper, as he took his life from zero to hero in a matter of days.  But where were the hurdles?  Where was the conflict?

The conflict finally came when we learn that the pills cause death and that the supply of these pills is quickly dwindling.  Oops.  Now our hero has problems.  And all this while he is still trying to achieve financial greatness and fame by working with a Gordon Gecko type of high power wall street trader played by Robert DeNiro.  This is where things begin to fall apart in the story.  Not only does he fail a "test meeting" with the DeNiro character, but then he blows him off several times in the next week.  I have a hard time believing a man of that kind of power would deal with that, but whatever.  Naturally juggling all this on top of a sweetheart of a girlfriend who wants nothing to do with drugs of any kind catches up to our hero in the end.  The most memorable scene is the climax of the movie when he is so desperate for the drug that (spoiler alert!!) he actually licks up blood off the floor from a dead Russian thug hit man just to get his "fix".  Gross!

After that things starting falling apart with the story at an unbelievable rate and even got hokey at times.  Our hero suddenly in 30 seconds makes friends with a man who has been trying to kill him all movie before stealing a stash of pills from a high power lawyer who would be smarter than to let him steal back the pills.  Clearly the writer was in a hurry to end the film.  Then in the final scene our hero lies to our high power wall street guy when he confronts him with the truth about the pills.  Um, why would Mr. Wall Street believe him after everything when we the audience didn't believe what he was saying at that point?  And just before the credits roll we see that the girlfriend is back in the picture and, I guess, suddenly lost her morals and is just dealing with hero boy on drugs.

So, the only lesson I can gather in this film is to take drugs, ignore the side effects, lie to everyone about the fact that you are on them and life will be exactly what you want it to be.  Yup, that sounds like a great thing to be teaching a society that is already overly addicted to pills of some sort.  In short, skip this and watch it on DVD if you must.  Or go but walk just after the lapping of the blood off the floor, because it's just down hill after that anyway.