I'm not one to do movie reviews, but I feel a lot of people missed the mark on this one.
In the movie, struggling writer Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper) loses everything including his girlfriend due to lack of motivation. Enter his ex brother in law who gives him a pill that releases his hidden potential. Rather than be some sappy feel good "what if" movie, it's pace picks up and stays up. He finds he can easily and quickly learn things and soon does what we would all do - turn to the stock market to get rich. He easily picks up on the idea of trading and tycoon Carl Von Loon (De Niro) picks him up as a protégé. Another fun character is Gennady (Andrew Howard) who is a Russian mob guy who loans Eddie the money for his initial investment on wall-street. There's a few other plots that all tie together with the drug and with the sudden rise to fame. Everybody wants what he's got, essentially, and some are more violent about getting it. The drug has some strange side effects, and most people that take too much wind up dead.
As ambitious as this all seems, I feel director Neil Burger pulls it off nicely. Honestly this is a far cry from some of his previous work (The Illusionist, Interview With An Assassin, The Lucky Ones) and really shows that his voice is not monotone. Too often you look at one movie done by a director and you already have your finger on his pulse (I'm lookin' at you Wes Anderson) and even though that may be a good thing in a way, it's always fun to have some diversity.
The special effects are crank style, but nowhere near as overdone. I wasn't expecting much, and was lounging across a couple of seats, but the opening scene made me sit up straight and pay attention. It was honestly breath-taking. It's one of those few times where the special effects actually fit the scenario and aren't just some excuse to throw in eye candy. The way they portray Eddie's time lag was perfectly done, and works well to put you in his shoes. They also show you how he knows the information he uses by showing clips and bits as it's happening which make for a pretty fun fight scene, among others.
After the movie I checked a few reviews including Roger Ebert's where he says:
I respect Ebert, I do, and perhaps he'd had a long day or something. This is an issue I'm harping on simply because I want to point out that there is a huge difference between intelligence and rationality. Anybody can be rational, and I wish more people were rational more often. Intelligence, though, is how efficiently a store of knowledge is used. Think of it this way - a site like blogger or IMDb is nothing more than a set of codes and parameters. Without input, they're essentially useless. Why would you go to a movie database that had no movies in it? Why go to a blog nobody is writing? How efficiently that movie database can sort through all the movies in it is what makes it great. A poorly written code that kept coming back with errors, or only gave partial results is what Eddie was at the beginning. What the pill gave him the ability to do is sort through everything. This is also why the Russian wasn't as smart, even though he'd found a better way to use NZT.
One last example - A man may be extremely intelligent, we'll even say he's a "quick learner". Maybe he rewired his house after reading a book, or learned a Spanish from watching Univision... If he never read anything about the body, we still wouldn't want him to operate on us. He has to go to medical school to become a doctor, not just to get a piece of paper, but to prove that he has the knowledge needed to work in the field he wants to enter. After he's proven he has that knowledge, he still has to enter into residency because we want to make sure he has the experience in making calls. You can't just google "heart transplant" and be a cardio specialist, and that's why I feel Ebert's response was comparing apples and oranges.
Would I say this is the best movie ever? Not likely. Would I say it's the best I've seen recently? It's definitely in the top 5. This movie was kind of a "thinking for dummies" in that it light heartedly pokes fun at the idea of not thinking. It mentions the urban legend that we only use 20% of our brains, then goes on to pose what could happen if we used all of it. When you realize that you already use most of it, then for a few minutes, perhaps longer, it feels like that glass ceiling is gone. It's hard to say who its target market is, really. It has eye candy, but a tight plot. It would be the same feeling you'd get if you found out "The Situation" had a masters in applied physics. I almost wish it had left a few loose ends, everything after the "12 months later" scene could be omitted, and it would be fine. I guess that's the fatal flaw in "Limitless", that it was too meticulous about wrapping up.
SPOILER ALERT!
When I got out I checked IMDb to see what others said about it and was shocked to see how much was missed by people. Several people think the hotel murder scene was never resolved. The moment of resolution isn't through some verbal explanation, but rather relied on Bradley Cooper's acting, and the audience's imagination. Hint - who does Eddie see "his" lawyer representing when he has escaped the Russians? His facial expression gives away more than a ten minute dialogue could... it's priceless. (okay for the truly dumb, think about it... if somebody really wanted the drug, and they were on the drug at the time, setting up a situation to frame somebody to gain access to their stash would be simple... put that together with his lawyer saying "Nice jacket. You have that made?" earlier in the film and you will make the same face Cooper did.)
The second thing people get tripped up about is "the one eyed thug that can't hit the side of a barn with his gun" - the guy was already blind in one eye, and had the other eye put out - leaving him completely blind. This is even verbally cued several times by him saying he can't see anything, and once more when our hero speaks russian and he doesn't know it's our hero. Add to that the fact that he was not shooting when our hero was on the floor but only when he heard something and you can figure out that perhaps he's blind.
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