This weekend I rented Limitless because I was bored out of my mind and wanted to see something with some action and sex in it. I was looking for a mindless time filler and, from the trailers, that was my impression of Limitless. However I was very surprised to find that it was a genuinely good movie.
First off it was nice to see Bradley Cooper play a slightly different role than the cock sure ladies man he’s usually cast as. He is that character for most of the movie but this time its not as lovable as it is in The Hangover, A-Team, or even Valentine’s Day. Instead the charm he has in this movie comes across as dark and manipulative, in fact the first thing he does after taking the new drug is to screw his land lord’s new wife. It seems wrong that the second he gains this new power he uses it to get laid, especially since in the previous scene he had been begging his girlfriend not to break up with him because he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. Also as the drug starts to wear on him you can see the conflict within Cooper because he needs the drug, literally, but he knows its going to end up killing him.
Another thing that was really cool about the movie was the lighting and colors. When Cooper is on the drug the color and lighting shift and become vibrant and bright, when he’s sober the film is shot in a darker lighting and the colors are dull. This is a cool little effect because it allows the audience to see why Cooper is so much happier on the drug. Why would you want to live in a gray world when you can take a pill and see in technicolor? Another cool effect were these really long shots where the camera would move through the entire city as one long zoom shot. Not sure how they did it, but it makes for one of the most interesting opening credit sequences of any movie I’ve ever seen.
My only major complaint about the movie was the ending because Cooper’s character doesn’t seem to have changed at all by the credits. There’s a scene towards the end where Cooper drinks the blood of another character who’s on the drug to get his fix. If you can over look the logistics of what I just said its a pretty powerful scene that shows how depraved drug addiction can make someone, and it shows how far the struggling writer at the beginning of the movie has fallen. Now you would expect someone who has done that to come out of the experience changed. But in the movie Cooper just sort of continues with his plan and ends up getting everything. He has all the abilities the pills give him without any side effects because he “tweaked” the formula. I wanted him to win in the end but also wanted him to have learned something from this awful experience, but he doesn’t. It doesn’t ruin the movie, but if there had been more of a character change at the end this movie would be great as opposed to just good.
I give this movie 3.5 brain enhancing pills out of 5.