Movie Critic Review: LIMITLESS!
'Rump took hundreds of milligrams of oxy every day up his nostrils, and sat on the couch for a year and watched movies'.(1) Here is a movie about the effects of another ….pill!
There is a trend nowadays in which a movie opens with an episode brought from somewhere down the road in the the narrative storyline, and then proceeds toward that same episode as events unfold. You will see this trend in "Battle: LosAngeles", "Skyline" 2010 and a few other movies. One would think that this trend or technique was more original and relevant to cinematic expression when it was employed in such movies as “American Beauty” for Sam Mendes (1999) or “Farewell, My Lovely" for Dick Richards (1975). This trend here appears more like a struggling gesture from the filmmaker to raise an issue and then attempt to resolve it as the movie goes on. Less original, in other words, and reminiscent of TV series of the sixties.In the opening scenes of “Limitless” we see Eddie (Bradley Cooper) on the verge of
throwing himself from his balcony and we listen to why he wanted to kill himself.
Then we are taken into a long flash back. But we do not have enough details to embrace this development of events. Rather we tend to think of Eddie as a lucky person whose whole life has changed positively because of a single pill he takes daily to expand and stretch his intellectual faculties as a writer. Bradley Cooper plays the role of this writer, Eddie, who realizes his inability to start a novel he was contracted to write for his publisher. Upon confiding his literary inability to a friend, the friend who happens to have been an
ex-drug dealer, pulls from his pocket a small plastic bag containing a tiny pill and promises the writer that this pill will make his brain work to its full hundred percent capacity rather than just the 20 percent it is commonly known to achieve.Eddie felt it was ridiculous at first but then took the pill in the evening and, Booom!
With one pill only he is already a genious!
The next day he rushes to get more pills from his friend but finds him dead in his apartment. He comes to know that the pill was not approved by health authorities and therefore was, unlike what his deceased friend had told him, illegal!
Bad guys who knew the value of this pill were closing in to lay hand on the whole treasure. Eddie finds the pills anyways and resumes taking them. He finishes the book in four days, learns thirty languages in thirty hours and becomes a stock exchange guru and an unfailing financial achiever. All this in about two weeks! Eddie goes on to restore his relationship with his ex-girl friend and pays back money he was indebted to Ginady (Andrew Howard ), apparently an east-European dangerous person. Ginady, in his turn, somehow learns about the pill and starts to pressure Eddie to surrender the pill to him.
Robert De Niro comes into the events as the consultant to Eddie in all his conflicts and corporate matters. Eddie has already suffered either from temporary loss of the pill, from
its side effects or from threats by Ginady. The events unfold in a suspenseful manner save
for the distracting use of a commentary voice or the exaggerated way in enacting some of the events.
Robert De Niro was present in this movie. Just there, with no effort at acting. He is like a cinematic credit card for new movies. By his mere presence the film is rated five stars!
Bradely did a little less in this crazy drama than he did in his previous comedy movie “The Hangover”.
This movie is recommended!
============
LIMITLESS (105 min), Suspense.
DIRECTOR: Neil Burger
CAST: Bradley Cooper, Robert De Niro, Abbie Cornish, Andrew Howard, Anna Friel, Johnny Whitworth.
SCREENPLAY: Alan Glyn
CINEMATOGRAPHER: Jo Willems [Color- digital]
MUSIC: Paul Leonard- Morgan
-------------
(1) Wrote someone defining oxy in Urban Dictionary.
Click Here!
Seriale Online
Thanks for the review. I never like BC's acting, however, I am very fond of R Dr Niro. I watched the film on a plane on my way to Australia, and only when I ran out of options. To say the truth I was bored to death especially after I know what the pills does. I was not even very excited by the opening scene where he was trying to jump! HELLO! How many people in the world do this everyday? What came to mind given his suit is that he might be a financial officer or director of some sort who was facing a scandal and hence the suicide (and the original story did not fall far away from that!). In short, flat and predictable!
ReplyDeleteThanks a lot for this nice post!
ReplyDelete