After being introduced to a new drug NZT, constant waste of space Eddie accomplishes the impossible, like learning languages as easy as pie, figuring out the most complex of mathematical equations which gets him on Wall Street and finishing off his lagging book in only 4 days! But he must deal with the obvious issues with any drug – someone will find out your secret, you’re gonna run out of your daily supply sometime soon and there are obvious side-effects of withdrawal.
In essence – Limitless is an interesting, okay-concept movie. There’s great use of shuffling colours, swift camera zooms and shifts, with letters falling from the sky and the ceiling switching and translating like a stock exchange display board, to depict the effects NZT is having on his brain. Robert De Niro makes a tiny appearance to give his little speech about what drugs can do to you! But he’s not on the screen long enough to make the movie poster, yet he is still on it.
Also there are some ridiculous moments which you expect from any movie trying to pull off the “high concept” label, like Bradley Cooper resorting to vampirism to survive and Abbie Cornish using a small child as a weapon in order to survive. There is even one point in the movie where I was asking myself the question is practically everyone in the movie using this drug?
By the time you get to the end of what I would regard as a fairly organized mess, you’re thinking what have I taken from this – all the people on a Wall Street are chewing on some kind of illegal substance? Possibly, but the underlying question I was left with – why didn’t Eddie use his “limitless” brain potential to find a possible medication which will reverse the negative side-effects of this drug?
