Jeremy’s Tophunder №95: Limitless

5 min readApr 8, 2020

The whole “we only use 10 percent of our brains — (fill in the blank) can access 100 percent of it” conceit is so goddamn stupid.

But Holy Jesus does it make for entertaining movies.

Lucy (2014) and Phenomenon (1996) are both abjectly terrible, with the protagonists suddenly developing telepathic and telekinetic powers, as if brain efficiency was what was holding us back from that kind of stuff. But, oh my god, they’re terrible in the absolute best way.

Limitless, on the other hand, take a farcical premise, and actually treats it with respect (kind of). Instead of suddenly developing (literal) superpowers, Bradley Cooper simply becomes, you know, really, really smart. They take a bad premise, and instead of making a bad (but fun) movie out of it, they make kind of a good movie out of it.

Let’s start with the high points.

The movie is very interesting visually. When characters are on the use-all-of-your-brain drug, there’s a sudden shift in the color pallet, the actor is sometimes shot with a fish-eye lens (to compress the space behind them and/or make their face look bigger on the screen), and they often make great use of a unique zoom effect to compress time. There are visual cues for all the enhancing effects of the drug. They don’t really assist with the storytelling, but they look cool.
The dialogue is quick and snappy, and Bradley Cooper is perfect for it. Cooper got his start in quick-witted comedies (Wet Hot American Summer, Wedding Crashers, The Hangover), and it shows. He was mostly fine as a brooding musician in A Star Is Born and as a brooding Navy SEAL in American Sniper, but my favorite Cooper performances are always in fast-paced, dialogue-driven character movies like Silver Linings Playbook or American Hustle. Cooper in an Aaron Sorkin movie would make me pretty giddy. Here, he just has to look nice and be a moviestar. It’s an easy role for him to knock out of the park, and he nails it.
Reviews of the movie often marked the convoluted storyline as a point of criticism. He’s a writer, then he’s working the stock market, then he might get charged with murder, then his girlfriend gets attacked, then the shady guys come to steal his drugs — there’s just a lot happening in the movie and the story isn’t exactly streamlined. However, I see the superfluous elements as kind of a nice touch. It’s almost a goof on how the drug allows Bradley Cooper to handle fifteen different things at once when he’s on NZT.
Robert De Niro seemed like, better than average, which is kind of noteworthy for him. Considering the degree to which De Niro has sold out and phoned in the majority of his performances in the last 25 years, getting even a B-level effort out of him is pretty nice. Like, yeah, he still makes The Robert De Niro Face all the time, but all things considered, Mercurial and Powerful Executive is one of the few roles that Bob can put in minimal effort and still pull off, and he does it here.
The music is great. Part of it is soundtrack, and part of it is original score, but both elements complement the story really well and help keep the pace moving quickly. And again, there are some nice musical cues that kick in when characters are taking the drug.

Now, the negative parts.

Holy crap is the ending super unsatisfying. They just hand-wave away all of the lingering questions about NZT side-effects and the need to maintain a consistent dose and all of that. If your solution to that troublesome plot point is “the guy takes more of the genius drug and solves all of the problems himself,” then you need to actually show us that. You can’t be lazy and just say that he did it. Furthermore, like 10 minutes ago, there were two different guys that were trying to kill him for his NZT supply. Are we supposed to think that they’re the only nefarious dudes out there looking for this drug? Remember, it makes you a zillion times smarter and has made two regular guys into multi-millionaires (and those are just the two we know about). It really seems like they shot the first hour and 45 minutes of the movie and then were like, “Wait, crap, we have to wrap up this whole story in the next scene? Okay fine, just, he’s a permanent genius now so everything’s cool. Cool?”

However, the movie is still incredibly fun. It’s fast-paced, it’s inventive (both with the premise and the actual story), and other than the ending, it’s actually reasonably well-executed. If you accept the premise that there’s a super-drug that makes you 500 percent smarter, the rest of the story plays out almost kind of the way you think it would. The only part that sticks out is the Russian Mobster Loan Shark angle — it seems like they just wanted to have a Russian Mobster Loan Shark in the movie and shoe-horned it in.

Like I said up top, I absolutely love the premise of something allowing someone to suddenly access “all” of their brain. Scientifically, it’s absolute horseshit. You do access all of your brain, you’re just using different parts at different times. If you suddenly could jump to 100 percent brain function, the result would (likely) be something resembling a seizure. That’s what a seizure is — “abnormally excessive or synchronous neuronal activity in the brain,” according to Wikipedia.

That said, these movies always get me. I kind of knew that I wanted to have one of these movies on my list, and I eventually narrowed it down to Limitless and Lucy. For a while, I couldn’t decide — I like and dislike Limitless because of all the reasons mentioned above, while I like Lucy because of its absurdity and substantial and hilarious departure from any kind of reality. Ultimately, I went with Limitless, because it at least seemed to try to take itself seriously sometimes, and actually does a decent job with it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a good movie. But it’s good enough to be my 95th-favorite movie.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

6. The Fugitive

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

13. Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

17. Ocean’s 11

22. Remember The Titans

24. Apollo 13

27. All The President’s Men

30. The Lion King

31. The Lost World: Jurassic Park