Limitless explores the sex appeal of using your whole brain
March 15th 2011 19:23
There are drugs to enhance sexual performance, but there's nothing that works at the other end, making your brain work better. However, there's probably a reason for this: In the new thriller Limitless, a man discovers a pill that makes you smarter, and the first thing he does with it is to talk a woman into bed. Who needs two drugs for the same thing?
However, after that, he sets out to make money, which seems a likely No. 2 goal. Limitless is a half-brutal, half-ironic adventure about what would happen if a man could use 100 per cent of his brain, rather than the 20 per cent with which most of us get by. The answers are both expected and surprising, and they come in a high-toned package that looks like what might happen if The Matrix were married to The Lost Weekend: visual surrealism with a hangover.
Speaking of which, the man who gets smart, named Eddie Morra, is played by Bradley Cooper (The Hangover) with his familiar air of handsome dissipation. ``What kind of guy without an alcohol or drug problem looks this way?'' Eddie narrates as we see him walking down a New York City street, a shambling figure with stringy, unwashed hair. ``Only a writer.''
Bingo. Eddie is a novelist with a book contract but no book, although we know this is about to change, because, in the film's opening sequence, he's standing on the ledge of his swanky highrise, getting ready to jump to his death. This flash-forward - something to keep us interested, in case we think this is going to be a story about a blocked novelist - morphs into a charging camera shot that races along sidewalks, in and out of car windows and down city streets, an early indication that director Neil Burger (The Illusionist) is going to take us for a ride of many stylistic flourishes.
Things change for Eddie when he meets his ex-brother-in-law, a dodgy sort who offers him a pill called NZT that will enable him to access all of his brain power. ``In the end, how much worse could it get?'' Eddie asks, and suddenly he becomes a lot brighter, and the movie along with him: Dark faces are illuminated, sunlight appears, and Eddie's brain is fully engaged. He recalls half-watched TV documentaries and old books. He sees the patterns, understands the algorithms, knows everything about everything, as he puts it, and, after a bit of sexual exploration, he's ready to get his life together. He gets a haircut, does the dishes - yes, it's a powerful drug that can make a single man ``abstemious and tidy,'' as Eddie says - and studies the stock market on his way to making a killing. He astonishes his editor with a flurry of pages from his overdue book. ``You're kidding,'' she says. ``Words have appeared on paper.''
The opening half of Limitless, which is based on the novel The Dark Fields by Alan Glynn, is a kind of superhero film of the mind: It's fun watching Eddie get into the game, and events flash by with genius speed. He breaks up with his girlfriend Lindy (Abbie Cornish), who's tired of his unregenerate laziness but loves to see him in jet-propulsion mode. He meets a tough financier named Carl Van Loon (Robert De Niro, back at home being intimidating) who represents the other side of capitalist success - the experience side - and an even tougher Russian who gets involved in his life.
``I don't have delusions of grandeur,'' Eddie says. ``I have an actual recipe for grandeur.'' But it depends on those little pills, and they prove to be an elusive secret with unpredictable side effects.
As Limitless takes us back to that opening scene on the ledge, it begins to follow the more familiar beats of the action film, although with a higher IQ than usual (``You're not stupid,'' says Carl. ``But don't make the classic smart person's mistake - thinking no one's smarter than you.'') Yet in the climactic showdown, it's not the intelligence of the hero, but that old secret weapon, the stupidity of the foe, that wins the day. Limitless is as rare as the drug it invents, a story about what it means to be really smart, rather than about what it means to be really priapic. Turns out it's almost the same thing.
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Comment by James Rickard
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Check this out...
I have to agree with the first point you make--maybe it's age but if there's no mental spark there, it's hard to fake interest.
Comment by katyzzz
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