By Joshua Knopp/managing editor
The moral of the story is to never accept pills from your ex-brother-in-law.
Photo courtesy Rogue Pictures
When Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper) makes this mistake in Limitless, it’s after hitting rock bottom. He has 90 pages of a novel due the next day and not a word on paper, and he’s just been left by his girlfriend and bank (Abbie Cornish). The drug that he accepts, however, increases his mental capacity exponentially.
By the time he goes to bed that evening, he’s finished the book, helped his landlord’s wife with her law paper, had sex and cleaned his apartment.
Morra comes into a long-term supply of the drug but soon finds himself targeted by others who have been exposed to it because seemingly no one knows who makes the drug and withdrawal is deadly.
“Allowing access to 100 percent of the brain,” as the advertisement states, isn’t really accurate. Humans use 100 percent of their brains every day, though not at the same time. The ability to use it all at once wouldn’t increase mental performance, either, because each part of the brain has its own job and doesn’t really lend itself to other tasks.
Limitless is, then, much more a study of addiction to power than a literal increase in brain function. Throughout the film, Morra encounters both businessmen (like Richard Bekins) and thugs (like Andrew Howard) who have encountered the drug and are either dying in defeat or stealing and murdering for more.
Morra himself spends the majority of the film either using his newfound abilities to collect obscene amounts of money in the stock market or trying desperately to maintain his supply.
The study is incomplete, but it is enough to cause thoughts to form in an attentive mind.
That Cooper plays a character who experiences a meteoric rise in Limitless is ironic because this film will complete his own. Bursting onto the scene in The Hangover and The A-Team, Cooper proves himself a legitimate star with a massive acting range with Limitless.
Another interesting note is that the film is based on a book written in 2001 called The Dark Fields. The book, which differs wildly from the film, is being re-released along with the movie being re-named Limitless. This confirms the marketing dominance of film over book with the latter adjusting clearly to the former.
