I’ve been busting to bust out a review of this film but an embargo forced me to keep my fingers away from the ‘upload’ function of the keyboard.
Now The Great Wall Of The Embargo has fallen so now I can speak freely.
Not everyone will agree this is a perfect film – but I think it’s close.
It may be criticized for rushing a couple of key moments at the end but hey – once you’re on the drug that is the Limitless movie, it’s easy to keep up.
So without getting all gushy – LIMITLESS had me at ‘hello’.
There’s a drug out there that ‘is Charlie Sheen’. It’s called NZT48 which could stand for: No Zoloft Thanks or New Zealand Toilet. But it doesn’t.
It’s a clear pill that gives you immediate clarity. Within 30 seconds it allows us to access that other 90% of our brains we don’t use. When this happens to Eddie – played by Bradley Cooper – he can recall and use every piece of info he’s ever come across in his life. So it turns him into a super-genius with super-powers and with a super sense of style. He wins back his lost love – played by Abbie Cornish – and gets a rare meeting with the corporate mogul of the millennium Carl van Loon – played by Robert de Niro. Nothing can stop Eddie’s meteoric rise to the top. Well, if he stops taking NZT everything stops – cos he’ll be dead. Now that’s a strong motivation to get comfy inside an addiction.
SIDE BAR – not sure if I’m reading too much into this but are the character names loaded with meaning? Loon would have to be a borderline lunatic to get where he is. Another one called Hank Atwood does indeed yank at his own wood throughout the movie. And the main character Eddie Morra – wants more and gets more because NZT is so damn more-ish.
Now – 8 reasons to see this movie on the big screen:
1 Bradley Cooper gets the best role of his career. I’ve not been a fan but he proves he can combine action, drama and humour. That’s tricky – but a superb script helps and a good director.
2 The ‘my dick’s bigger than your dick’ speech de Niro’s character gives Cooper is screenplay gold and will have some corporate types learning it by heart to recite to upstart underlings.
3 Director Neil Burger’s cinematic vision – the vomiting scene is quite simply – art. It’s impossible to feel sick watching Cooper heave his guts up on a footpath when you see how Burger shot it.
4 Cooper’s reaction to a dead body – the best and more realistic I’ve seen in a long time. Funny too.
5 You’ll get a better idea of what Charlie Sheen has been on – til he took too much and well, the rest is quickly becoming history.
6 The music – great recent release tracks that feature in indie charts and on playlists and are also on high rotation on my ipod and associated devices.
7 The social comments that are made about: the data stream of info that surrounds and invades us; the nature of addiction to success; the wishful thinking that we need to be better than we are; the quick fix of a wonder drug; the notion that consequences come later thus making procrastination of responsibility okay.
8 The sheer joy of imagining what it could be like to be the best possible version of yourself, cartwheeling through life with a limitless ability to succeed at every single task of your daily life – all made possible by an anti-apathy drug – an Anthony Robbins motivational course in pill form.
Lots of people will think Limitless is not as a good a movie as Inception.
I am not one of those people.
As much as I love director Christopher Nolan’s work, Inception was bloated and pompous. At best, it was the bastard child of David Lynch on a bad day and Michael Bay on… any day.
If you wanted to like Inception but couldn’t fit on the ‘Chris Nolan Can Do No Wrong’ bandwagon, then you might like Limitless more.
I know I did.
NB I just interviewed Bradley Cooper about Limitless 3 hours ago. Tune into Movie Juice 6pm Monday on STARPICS to find out what he said about working with Robert de Niro AND hear what he had to say when I hit him up for a bit of his secret stash of NZT.