Review: Limitless

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Limitless

Drugs are bad, 'mmkay? In this post-Nancy Reagan War on Drugs age, we drink from the pharmaceutical fountain more than ever. We have pills to perk you up, pills to calm you down, pills for social anxiety, pills for depression and pills for erectile dysfunction. In fact, it seems like the only drugs it's not okay to take are the ones that exist just to have fun.

In Limitless, Bradley Cooper discovers the most exceptional drug ever created. Unfortunately, for a top-secret prototype, a lot of people seem to know about it and want to get their hands on it. On top of avoiding all the people who want to get their hands on his stash and negotiating corporate mergers to build his empire, Eddie (Cooper) begins to learn that the brain power the drug lets him access has to be paid back with devastating consequences.

Packed with unique visual tricks and a great score, Limitless is an exilharating and suspenseful metaphor for traditional drug abuse. It is also something of a superhero tale for nerds. Geniuses, unfortunately, are not typically the object of admiration in films. Some examples of film brainiacs are Lex Luthor from Superman, Professor Moriarty from Sherlock Holmes, The Master from Doctor Who, and almost every villain from James Bond. Even when the genius is the hero of the movie, the character is flawed in some terrible way, as with John Nash in A Beautiful Mind where he is a likable genius but suffers paranoid schizophrenia. Bruce Wayne in Batman is a genius scientist who is almost insane due to the murder of his parents. Or, my favorite example, Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting, a movie I despise because Will Hunting is an insufferable jackass (and not a particularly good genius, either).

Eddie Morra in Limitless is a smart guy in his own right who is down on his luck, dealing with writers block, the loss of a girlfriend and still pining over the ex-wife who he still loves. Then he stumbles into his ex-brother-in-law who supplies him with the experimental drug that doesn’t just make him smarter, it makes him better. Instead of being unlikable or insufferable, he's smooth, suave, sophisticated, the ideal that every nerd knows he can be but never manages to pull off.

That’s what I like most about Limitless, watching a good guy get caught deeper and deeper in trouble but managing to use his brain to slip through the cracks. The movie is smart, fast-paced, and ultimately satisfying as characters do just what you’d expect them to do in such a situation. The first thing any fool would do when gifted with a magic lamp is to wish for more wishes, and that’s exactly what Eddie does, paying a chemist to research and duplicate the magic pills. Everyone who gets their hands on it wants to get more, and that drives the majority of the plot of the film. I loved every second of Limitless, and I can’t wait to go see it again.