Limitless is from a couple of years ago and I’d never heard of it, so it must not have made too much of a splash at the time, but we watched it tonight so here are my views.
It was about a guy who gets hold of a drug which makes him super-duper smart, like that time John Travolta got hit by lightning, or Cliff Robertson in Charlie.
Despite his “four digit” IQ, DeNiro has him sussed and he doesn’t even know it
First off, even though I totally enjoyed it, it was kind of a shit film. Although in its really dark sections it seemed to be a fictionalized docudrama about the horrors of drug addiction, like when his ex-wife confessed to him that she’d been an addict and they had that montage scene where he called all the names in that notebook and they were all dead or in the hospital, and those parts were actually pretty good, but the rest of the time they seemed to be going for a light hearted comedy, and those are two genres which don’t mix at all, a director needs to pick a direction and go for it.
Also, after he boinked the landlord’s sexy Asian wife, nothing happened and she wasn’t heard from again, after he wrote his book the book was never heard from again, and they never explained who murdered the slutty blonde chick or, for that matter, why? And, as well as a lot of stuff being left out, some really extraneous stuff was there for no reason. Like everybody on Wall St. is amazed at his genius, and he needs to go to the Russian Mafia for seed money and then he makes millions in a couple of days and he forgets to pay him back?
Then it winds up with him totally just having figured out how to handle the drug, which sort of negates the entire meaning of all those characters (who, even in the middle of a celluloid fantasy, are still only known by allusion) who died to move the plot forward.
Worst, he doesn’t really seem to have any grand design, and plan to use the drug going forward except to be smarter than everybody else but, he’s not exactly being a superhero or anything.
I really like the concept, though, of having access to 100% of your brain power. And the fight scenes were pretty well done.
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