Limitless

Limitless features an interesting and valuable subject that had great potential for a truly top-notch sci-fi thriller. However, this potential was wasted by an average screenplay that dealt with the subject in the easiest and least risky way for producers, resulting in a technically polished and professionally directed thriller, but one that also amounts to quite an undemanding popcorn movie with logical gaps. It is necessary to ask why the distribution of a commercially extremely interesting drug collapses after the death of the only dealer. How is it possible that the only user manages the correct dosage, and why can users who are pumped by chemicals that greatly enhance cognitive performance not obtain the appropriate substance from the manufacturer given their intelligence quotient? Not to mention that competition between individual geniuses themselves would have much greater potential. However, that would require an extra intelligent screenwriter who would probably have to be on the drugs himself. Many others have mentioned the quality of the cinematography and dynamic direction, and I agree with that and give the film a weaker 4 stars, noting that it could have been significantly better. Overall impression: 70%. (18/10/2011)

A watchable film with entertaining formal tricks, but the script has a lot of problems. I was very annoyed by the main character behaving like an asshole all the time (and even more with the smart pill). Of course that made up drug can work in any way the creators see fit, so it’s pointless to look for any logic in its effect, but it still prevented me from fully enjoying the film. And either I didn’t understand its meaning, or the ending is utterly stupid. (21/05/2011)

Limitless grows more stupid as the screenwriter runs out of pills. The idea on which the film is based is used skilfully at first and Burger succeeds in filling the holes in the logic (and in the chosen form of the narrative) with a boatload of optical effects. As the minutes pile up, the very simple initial situation begins to show signs of wearing thin until the people behind the camera seriously have no idea what else they can squeeze out of it (in the climax, they basically take a blind shot in the dark), at which point the film ends. The underused potential of the central premise is revealed by the cautious stab at politics just before the closing credits roll. If the plot had unfolded in this direction from the beginning, without the cheap subplot involving an Eastern European taxidermist desperately passed off as the main plot, Neil could have given us a nicely biting satire for our hour and forty minutes instead of another toothless thriller. 60% (26/03/2013)

"I was blind, but now I see." A visual delicacy with a clever screenplay (which, along with 3DD!3, could be even cleverer ;). Burger knows how to sell a picture and his firm hand leads us through the nooks and crannies of a lazy writer who received his gift from God out of the blue. Bradley Cooper shows that he is someone to look out for in the future. His Eddie changes into three separate people and he is able to present them so convincingly to the viewer that you end up rooting for all of them. De Niro enjoys his more minor role of son-of-a-bitch magnate, it’s fine to see him act again and not just pull faces. Well to hell with the negative effects, I need that pill! (15/04/2011)

Say yes to drugs? Limitless is a decently made, but ordinary, sometimes very stupidly naive fairy tale with a blatantly messed up ending (I really don't think one needs any special finesse to hit another person in the head with a TV, or to put a dish brush in his mouth). But the film thankfully has a likable Bradley Cooper, and Robert De Niro, although he doesn't have much to do this time and is in the film mainly to be in it. They say the book is better. I'd like to believe it, but I don't want to read it. God knows who wrote it and under what influence. (20/08/2011)