Maybe Only Eighty Percent Stupid

When doing one of my monthly specials, like Sci-Fi Saga September, I try to make sure I get interesting items that I haven’t seen before, or at least in a while. I don’t need to review and re-review the same things over and over again, even if sometimes rewatching things can be fun, and there’s so many movies out there in just about every genre that I haven’t reviewed for this site that I could keep digging and finding new things and never run out of material. Still, even then, some things will fall through the cracks.

Limitless is one such movie. It came out in 2011 and didn’t exactly set the world on fire. Considering the size of its budget, $27 Mil, it made a very respectable $161.8 Mil at the Box Office, giving its lead star, Bradley Cooper, a solid hit for his resume and proved that he could be more than just “that one guy from The Hangover” or “the poor man’s Matthew McConaughey.” It was a solid, interesting, charismatic turn that proved Cooper had the chops to be an actor and could carry films.

It just so happened that the film in question was a low-grade, not really good, speculative sci-fi cheapie. It’s a film that dares to ask, “what if humans could access their whole brain,” which is, of course, one of those science quips that was quickly disproven. If humans didn’t use their whole brain, evolution wouldn’t have built the whole thing. The brain gets used and people that believe otherwise are stupid. So that whole concept leads to pretty stupid films (see also: Lucy), but in the case of Limitless you don’t really care so much. Is it dumb? Yes, but as carried by Cooper it’s still a fun movie to watch regardless.

Eddie Mora (Cooper) is a down-on-his-luck writer that just can’t get his crap together. He’s been working for years now on a novel, spending the advance his publisher gave him, and then some, without producing a single word (how he got a publishing deal without even a treatment on a book is a mystery left unexplained by the movie). To make it worse his girlfriend, Lindy (Abbie Cornish), just dumped him, cutting and running because she, like everyone else in Eddie’s life, can tell he’s a sinking ship. Hell, Eddie can tell he’s a sinking ship, he just doesn’t know how to fix himself.

Help comes along in the form of Vernon Gant (Johnny Whitworth), the brother of Eddie’s ex-wife, Melissa (Anna Friel). Vernon used to deal drugs but he swears what he has is pharmaceutical and about to be legal. It’s a little pill, clear and unassuming, that fires up the brain. It makes you smarter, lets you think more clearly, unlocks all the bits of the brain humans don’t use. It’s called NZT and it’s a miracle. He gives Eddie a free sample and, after some hemming and hawing, Eddie takes it. And it’s like magic. His life suddenly comes together. He’s brilliant, he’s effective, he’s everything the old Eddie wasn’t. He wants more. But when he gets to Vernon’s place the guy is dead, and there are others that want Vernon’s stash. Eddie ends up as the one guy with NZT, and now he has to figure out what to do with it before everything comes crashing down.

Calling Limitless sci-fi is really overselling it. While it has some interesting ideas about how a person could work if they were suddenly much, much smarter (think Flowers for Algernon but with a handy once-a-day pill), the whole concept is inherently pretty silly. A magical street drug that makes you have a (and I quote the movie here) thousand point IQ doesn’t exist, and the way the film presents it makes it unlikely anything like this could ever exist. I’m not going to call it as implausible as the warp drive, for example, but it’s up there, for sure.

And that’s skipping over the whole “use more than twenty percent of your brain” thing because I think even the film knows that’s stupid. It has the idiot drug dealer character say it so it can then casually dismiss it. Yes, Eddie gets much faster on the drug, and he accesses his brain more efficiently (pulling up facts from years before as if they were right at the tip of his tongue and at the ready) but that’s not really the same thing. He’s just better, smarter, faster. They rebuilt him with the power of NZT.

With that said, I do appreciate the story for what it is. A guy gets a pill and gets smarter, then has to get more of it to stay smarter. But as he uses it, and especially as he overuses it, he starts to notice unusual side effects, things that give him pause about how good the drug is and if he should really be taking it at all. That’s an interesting hook, likening the drug to, well, drugs. The high is being smarter, a kind of euphoria that’s also functional, and it creates an interesting hook for the story. The film doesn’t really know what to do with that hook in the last act where, by that point, Eddie has already figured out how to deal with the side effects and not feel them, casually dismissing a key plot point like it was nothing… okay, so yeah, the story isn’t perfect.

What it really comes down to is Bradley Cooper and how well he sells the character. Eddie is not a likable character. It’s a wish fulfillment fantasy about how anyone could become an upper echelon member of society if they just had a simple pill they could take. But it’s not as though Eddie earned this chance. He was just some dumb schmuck that knew a drug dealer and happened to luck into a huge supply of the magical drug. And he doesn’t use it to make things better. He gets smart, then uses it to get wealthy, and then uses it to become a politician by movie’s end. Never once does he talk about the good things he could do or how he could use his massive, four-digit impossible IQ to make the world a better place. Eddie uses it for entirely selfish reasons and the only reason we don’t hate him for it is because he’s played by the highly charismatic Bradley Cooper. A less interesting actor in the lead role and we absolutely hate everything about this film.

And, I’m just saying, if Eddie really were as smart as he’s saying he wouldn’t still be as charismatic as Bradley Cooper. Having known very smart people (much smarter than myself) there’s this thing where once you get too smart you tend to lose a lot of that charisma. At a four-digit IQ, Eddie would be pretty robotic, very hard to be around. He’d see things before others did, talk over them, be unable to hold conversations because they bored him. He wouldn’t be this suave guy like the film portrays. We either have to accept that Eddie isn’t as smart as he thinks he is or, more like, the film just doesn’t really know what it’s going at times.

Which is fine because we really shouldn’t take it too seriously. It’s a very well filmed, slickly produced, but of wish fulfillment with the charismatic Cooper at the center of it all. I’ve watched the film a couple of times over the years and enjoyed it each time, just like I did when I watched it for this review. But I also realize that every time, after I’m done with the film, I set it aside and largely forget about it. Limitless is a fun film with a solid actor but it’s also an entirely disposable bit of shallow speculative fiction. It’s fun, but in the end also very empty, and once you’re done with it you’ll probably forget you ever watched it at all.

At least until you get that next hit of NZT and suddenly recall everything about the film in great detail. Maybe it’s a good thing that pill doesn’t really exist.