Limitless Review

Limitless is all about a guy who (at least at the beginning of the film), is down on his luck. That guy is Eddie (played by Bradley Cooper).

The film doesn't hesitate in telling us what a loser Eddie is, and in the first few scenes alone we see that he has a book contract that he has fallen behind on, his girlfriend, Lindy, breaks up with him, and we find out he was engaged once - but that never worked out either. On top of all this Eddie's looking pretty rough right now too.

Fresh from being dumped, Eddie bumps into his ex-fiance's brother, Vernon, who comes across as a nice guy. They meet up and it doesn't take long for Eddie to tell him about the book deal going down in flames, and so Vernon tells Ed about this pill. He claims it's government approved, completely safe, but won't be on the market for months. It is the clear pill and it's what this film is about.

Bad looking Eddie, getting some "help" from ex's brother, Vernon

The science goes that we only use a small part of our brain's overall potential. This pill unhinges our entire brain and basically makes you a very clever person. Of course Eddie takes it, and he soon sees the benefits. 
I'm not going to give away much more about the story, but lets just say that this pill isn't as amazing as it looks at first glance. On top of that, Eddie does end up grabbing some attention and soon things go from bad to worse. But that's enough story, I always try to avoid giving out spoilers in these reviews.

I did enjoy Limitless. I thought the acting was strong throughout, and that the film was generally well paced and I never really got bored. There is also a narrative from Eddie which on numerous occasions offered some comic relief, which was welcome in between the more serious moments of the film.

I also enjoyed the camera effects that came into play once the drug was taken by Eddie or anyone else. It put across the type of high that the characters must have been feeling very well.
But unfortunately, at some points in the middle of the film I thought these effects were slightly over-used and made it confusing and hard to figure out what was happening. Fortunately, these times only happened once or twice and didn't ruin the film for me.

However something that did end up tainting this film was the ending. As I said before I don't give out spoilers in these reviews so I'm not going to tell you what happened, but for me it seemed to leave a lot of unanswered questions. This was made worse by the fact that I found the finale to be so exciting, so the ending just left a bad taste in my mouth.

Despite this, Limitless was a good film which I enjoyed a lot, and my criticisms with the ending shouldn't stop you from renting or buying it. Despite the fact that it has some dark underlying themes of drug addiction it still manages to stay entertaining.

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