Limitless: review

Robert De Niro and Bradley Cooper as Carl Van Loon and Eddie Morra

Limitless is a 2011 science-fiction film directed by Neil Burger (The Illusionist, Divergent) and starring Bradley Cooper, Abbie Cornish, Andrew Howard, Anna Friel, and Robert De Niro. The story centers on a struggling writer named Eddie Morra (Cooper) who is given a nootropic (mind-enhancing) pill called NZT-48 by his brother-in-law Vernon (Johnny Whitworth). Vernon is killed by mysterious parties; meanwhile, Eddie takes the pill and discovers untold horizons as his mind suddenly opens up to a universe of scintillating possibilities. On fire, Eddie completes the manuscript for his latest book, handing it to his agent, who is at first befuddled, then flabbergasted by the genius radiating from the book's pages. The pill's effects apparently last only a day, thus requiring Eddie to take a pill a day. Eddie find's Vernon's hidden supply, but he is constantly worried about what happens when he runs out of pills. And instead of taking just one pill per day, Eddie overdoses as he hungrily seeks to enhance his intellect as far as it can go. But because the pill isn't perfect, Eddie suffers strange side effects. At the same time, he is being stalked by the same people who had killed Vernon, including by a mysterious man in a trench coat (Tomas Arana, Gladiator). Despite his troubles, Eddie nevertheless manages to repair his relationship with his girlfriend Lindy (Cornish), but he still has to deal with Russian loan shark Gennady (Howard). He also rises in the business world and eventually meets Carl Van Loon (De Niro), a tycoonish stand-in for Elon Musk or Bill Gates or some other real-life billionaire (trillionaire for Musk these days). Before a crucial meeting with Van Loon, Eddie suffers a severe blackout period during which he may or may or may not have killed someone. Realizing that his life is spinning out of control, Eddie turns his newly gifted intellect to creating a better version of NZT-48. Meanwhile, he promises his girlfriend that he's getting off the drug, but by the end of the movie, Eddie's relationship with the pill is left ambiguous. We never find out whether he succumbs to side effects; we also never learn whether Eddie definitively defeats Carl Van Loon, who by the end has become Eddie's rival (without, apparently, taking any NZT himself).

I ended up thinking that the movie, billed as a "thriller" and occasionally narrated by Eddie in wry-storyteller mode, was more of a dark comedy than anything else. Many scenes are intentionally humorous, such as when a desperate Eddie, realizing that one of his enemies has NZT in his bloodstream, stabs his foe and drinks his blood just to enhance his own mind and escape his current predicament. The movie is also smart enough to have Eddie realize that he's not the only one taking NZT, but at the same time, the film makes no real attempt to bring all of these enhanced people together or to show them all at their peak. In fact, the movie misses many opportunities to have Eddie show off his own genius. As they say, the characters in a story are only as smart as their writers, and most writers aren't smart enough to portray true genius. That problem may in fact be one of Limitless's most basic flaws.

Where the movie excels, though, is in its trippy, Zoomquilt-style visuals, a wordless cinematic language meant to represent the deliriously rapid expansion of Eddie's consciousness. Other visuals are House-like in nature, featuring CGI representations of the interior of a brain or ever-ramifying blood vessels or closeups of eyes. One benefit of NZT is how it allows the user to access old, even fleeting memories that can be employed to one's advantage, such as when Eddie gets into a fight with several thugs and outfights them after accessing memories of self-defense videos on YouTube. Eddie picks up the piano, learns French (actor Bradley Cooper is more or less fluent in French), and even picks up Chinese by the end (online reactions to Bradley Cooper's Chinese, however, were less than positive; he was apparently unintelligible).

The most interesting and frustrating aspect of Limitless, though, is that it seems to have no clear moral. It was based on a 2001 novel called The Dark Fields by Irish author Alan Glynn. I haven't read the novel, but the movie seems to suggest, by the end, that Eddie has indeed successfully engineered his own version of NZT-48 and now has all side effects under control as long as he uses the drug in moderation. Is Eddie the bad guy of the story, or is he just extremely lucky to have received this miracle drug and harnessed its effects? The story sometimes feels like a warning about addiction, and about the artificiality of using a drug to accomplish wonders instead of good old effort and self-discipline. Perhaps the true moral is that Eddie has found a key to living a successful life, and by the end, he has learned that moderation is crucial for continued success. It's hard to say.

In all, I found Limitless entertaining but somewhat pointless, a clumsy riff off Flowers for Algernon. Bradley Cooper and the rest of the cast play their parts well enough, and the movie's imagery is often a visual love letter to New York City, so the movie gets points for acting and cinematography. The story, however, felt lacking in fundamental ways, and as I said earlier, I couldn't help thinking of all of the missed opportunities that could have taken the plot in many interesting directions.

UPDATE: Watch this incredible scene from Charly to see what Limitless could have been.