Monday, May 23, 2011

Limitless (2011)


I felt much the same way about Limitless as I felt about Surrogates: here you have an intriguing TV sci-fi concept trapped within a dumb big screen format. It's hard to add much to Roger Ebert's conclusion - that here's a movie about a pill that allows you to access the 'missing' 85% of your brain, that's only really using 15% of its own - but I will add that there were parts of the film that struck me as existentially unsettling. Maybe it's my own nagging sense of under-achievement, or perhaps it was the fact that we never get proper resolution of the rather crucial issue of whether NZT has turned Eddie into a pyschotic killer as well as facilitating his ability to pre-cog the market and hold conversations in Cantonese with the waiters at his local Chinese restaurant. Bradley Cooper seems oddly well cast as Eddie Morra, a bit of a creep both on an off the medication, and emblematic of a movie that seems unsure whether its halcyon presentation of the American Dream is desirable fantasy or disturbing satire.

Grade: B


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