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Kevin Michael Vance
Writer - Portland, Oregon
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Title: LIMITLESS
Director: Neil Burger
Year: 2011
Reviewed: December 31, 2011
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Birthday Cake-Second Highest Rating |
[Rating Definitions]
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Inevitably I think, LIMITLESS, the movie, failed for me on many different levels. It is not bad, but it is also not good.
The concept is good, albeit one bandied about for as long as I can remember. Say you believe that we as human beings only use a small percentage of our brains. Someone (we never find out who) creates a drug, which activates the redundant, and or latent, percentage of our brain. Enter Bradley Coopers character, a struggling writer who immediately takes said drug. Thus ensues a slew of somewhat intelligent, somewhat moronic, series of unlikely and unbelievable misadventures; in which, Eddie, meanders about New York city at times like a genius, at other times like an idiot savant.
First off, there are a slew of unrealistic and horribly filmed action pieces. A killer chases the protagonists girlfriend through a crowded central park with a knife -- A KNIFE! He has no gun, albeit this is the twenty-first century. The evil Russian mobster has a gun, but the killer does not. The killer looks old and feeble, but he is supposed to look cold and menacing. The girlfriend hides behind rocks and calls her boyfriend (the protagonist) on a cell phone (which she has had the entire time) pleading with him to tell her what to do. Instead of hanging up and calling 911, (I am told you can do that on those things). She takes the SMART drug and comes up with the most convoluted and STUPID way of escaping the not-so-threatening killer I think I have ever seen. (Suffice it to say, she uses a childs ice skates… and the CHILD IS STILL IN THE SKATES!) This is just one of many dumb actions taken by these, supposed, super brains. (At one point, the director or writer or whomever, has Eddie sucking up the Russian mobsters blood, which has pooled on the floor, so he can think his way out of a horrible situation -- the blood having traces of the super drug in it).
Secondly, we have the skewed and somewhat drear theme, and or, message of the film. Basically, it is morally vacuous. We are supposed to care about a character who takes a drug to accomplish something he couldn’t achieve sober, becomes a man-whore, gets away with murder, becomes a drug addict, obsesses about money and power, and finally gets into politics after murdering, sleeping, and slandering his way through Manhattan. There is really nothing to like about Eddie. He is a stone-cold loser. Yet somehow, the director and writer want me to spend 2 hours with him, and inevitably care what happens. I do not. As with the film, the characters are morally bankrupt; which would be okay if they got what was coming to them, but they do not. Just as the title of the film implies, their power is Limitless. They do whatever they please and suffer no consequence of any kind. Multiple gun shots fire in a million dollar condo; strange men with knives chase beautiful women through parks; strange men chase other men through crowded streets, and the cops never show up. Not once. It is all so convenient and hackneyed and forced and unrealistic, and inevitably – stupid. This is supposed to be a movie about burgeoning intelligence, untapped reservoirs of the mind, limitless possibilities, and it comes off feeling dumb.
This is why LIMITLESS fails for me. And that is why I give it a BIRTHDAY CAKE review.
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