Review of Limitless

Limitless (I) (2011)
1/10
Incredibly shallow
21 August 2011
Warning: Spoilers
Where to begin with this movie? The concept is interesting enough (super drug that enables all our human powers), but the execution of that idea in this movie was a total disaster.

It's an incredibly shallow story, where our main guy works his way up in the system by writing a great book whilst on these magic pills, gets involved with a silly loan shark at some point, who for some reason seem to haunt him throughout the movie. His girlfriend is involved also, and is hunted down by a man who is constantly following our protagonist, and in what is one of the movie's absolutely dumbest scenes, said girlfriend manages to escape from this guy by making a run for it (having hidden from her follower behind some trees for some time, nobody knows exactly why the follower knew she was hiding behind those 4-5 trees, he's waiting there for her for a long time, instead of simply looking behind the trees, something you would do if you suspected someone you were looking for hiding there), using a kid on skates to slash this guy down in an ice-skating rink.

Later on our man manages to achieve success and the American Dream is complete (of course). The conversations in the movie are shallow very Hollywood-esque, easy to swallow, but it doesn't really seem real.

In exploring an idea that could be very interesting, the movie doesn't really deal with or manages to show the different facets of how a brain on this drug could in fact function. We basically just see a person who is "good" at performing whatever it is he does (and the visuals of the movie sharpens or "lights up" every time he takes one of the pills), in this case, investing money and writing, and ultimately, archieves his goal - by staying on these pills. But there's no in-depth exploration of the idea, just a shallow American Dream-story, that we've seen so many times before, but a lot better told than this.
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