Bradley Cooper, as Eddie Morra, gets brain-nuked and becomes a 24-hour Albert Einstein. Or Warren Buffet, or Bruce Lee, or James Joyce (though we never get to actually read Eddie's magnum opus). As a down-on-his-luck struggling writer, hair unkempt, head unclear, Eddie bumps into his ex brother-in-law (a dangerous species), who learns of his problem and prescribes him a cure: a magic pill called NZT. According to the smarmy ex in-law, the little pill will help solve Eddie's writer's block...no, actually, it will help solve every puzzle there is on Earth _ mathematical, scientific and particularly, financial.
Limitless builds Eddie's exploits from that chemically-induced premise. The movie, a surprise hit in the US, whisks us along its preposterous ride quite obligingly, but then it's too thin as a thriller and too lightweight as a parody. In our pill-prone world (the US especially, despite the Medicare drama), the thought of a miraculous pill that frees our mind and destroys mental limits has existential, sci-fi and psychedelic possibilities, but Limitless, while fairly diverting, only goes for each in a half-hearted manner.
So what does this pill do exactly? Well, it unclogs and unleashes. A human's brain, the ex in-law preaches to Eddie, functions at only 20% of its maximum capacity, and his pill will turbocharge to 100, making every mental activity not only possible, but terrifying. So Eddie pops it in, and he finishes his novel in four days, learns exotic languages in no time, becomes a law scholar and masters kung fu, while everything he's learned or glimpsed at as a child comes back to him in a great flood of lucidity. In short, it's brainwashing _ but in a brilliant way.
It's not explained how exactly this cerebral uncorking works. Does it merely enhance Eddie's memory? Or does it boost his intelligence, reasoning, IQ, and the quality (not just speed) of his neuro hard drive? Not that it really matters _ for the joy of the world, a pharmaceutical hokum is a given _ otherwise we'll have to find out why the pill's effect only lasts for a day. That presents Eddie with a big problem, since he'll need a constant supply of the drug in order to keep up his pretence. And then a bigger problem arises when Eddie finds the ex in-law dead in his apartment; apparently, someone is after the lot of magic pills.
It's interesting _ and here the film, made from Alan Glynn's novel, could've found an angle for a social satire _ that instead of devoting his newfound brilliance to the cause of humanity or the invention of something useful, like a great supply of those pills themselves to ensure his cerebral well-being, instead of those things, Eddie spends his limitless brain power on making some fast bucks in the stock market. After one week, the initial capital borrowed from a loan shark blooms into a few million dollars, and Eddie is the hottest property on Wall Street. His ex (Abbie Cornish) returns beaming with wide-eyed admiration, while the legendary venture capitalist Carl Van Loon (Robert De Niro), sniffs Eddie out and asks him for advice.
To visualise Eddie's turbocharged thinking performance, director Neil Burger (perhaps best known for The Illusionist, starring Edward Norton) employs a gamut of cinematographic tricks and visual effects, from fisheye lenses to lengthy crash zooms, from a downpour of alphabets, as Eddie writes his novel to a ceiling slowly metamorphosed into a stock market scoreboard when he turns into a financial wizard. They're all eye-catching, half-mocking and reminding me of the gimmickry of early Danny Boyle films.
Limitless is a fantasy-thriller that finds its limit along the way, and its shot at being a cautionary tale against capitalist greed remains muddled. What perhaps makes the whole thing pleasant enough is Bradley Cooper's egomaniacal smirk, and then, well, Robert De Niro's egomaniacal smirk, more self-aware though, in the latter's case. The two men's verbal duel isn't as charged as we would expect, and the film could've been darker, more sinister, while Cooper's bright-boy features could've made his eventual fate more tragic. As it is, Limitless is 90 minutes of fun that evaporates faster than NZT.
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