Limitless

On the last day when I could redeem my free tickets for being a member of a rewards program, the girlfriend and I had a choice to make: watch a movie with a nice premise and a lot of promise, or go for the latest Filipino romantic comedy that boasts the newest love team that people would go ga-ga over. The free tickets were only valid for those two movies.

Given that the last flick we watched, Red Riding Hood, also had a nice premise (the re-telling of the Little Red Riding Hood folk tale with a werewolf twist) and was pretty promising as well, but turned out blech, we were given pause. But a Filipino romantic comedy? Really?

I mean, I have nothing against Filipino movies, per se, but the ones that get out there right now are just, well, not all too good.



And so we went and watched Limitless, the first movie I've seen where Bradley Cooper was not playing some smart-ass wisecracker. He plays Eddie Morra, an aspiring writer who encounters a mental block until he reconnects with an ex-brother in law, who introduces him to a breakthrough drug that was supposed to unleash the full potential of the human mind. It leads him down a path of ultimate enlightenment and the problems and complexities that come with being ultra-smart and being a drug dependent. Someone starts following him, a loan shark comes after him, and he starts experiencing side effects of the drug. On top of that, he is in a job with a lot of pressure, trying to broker a merger between his boss' (played by Robert De Niro) company and another one that suddenly came up and challenged it. And, let's not forget that he's also trying to win back the girl who dumped him because he was too engrossed in his work as a writer.

First of all, I am not totally averse to having voice overs during the course of the movie. But to have a voice over every five to ten minutes is too much for me. I mean, come on, there are other devices to let the people know what your character is thinking, right? Why cop out and use the voice over? I might have been able to take it better if, say, the voice over character was actually telling someone a story at the beginning of the movie. But no, the character was addressing the audiences and no one else.

As for the story, it was a tad too long for me. For the most part, it seemed to be a cautionary tale against being too dependent on medication. It showed the side effects of being over-medicated, even if it helped you to do your work better. But then they pushed past that and even began to say that medication is good because it can lead you to the top. Talk about mixed signals.

They also took added too many conflicts. The movie itself would have been a good conspiracy theory-type movie with just the shadowy guy following and the merger issue. I mean, in the end, that is what ties it all up. But then you have the loan shark, the girl friend, and then after the merger issue he seemed to be beginning to have some conflicts with De Niro's character. During the course of his drug trip, they even introduced a murder that he may have committed - a storyline that was later dropped. All of the conflicts muddled up the whole story-telling.

Cooper did himself well in the role though. While it was not an Oscar award meriting performance, it was still good to see him play something other than the joker or the witty guy. He was just this really smart character who got even smarter after the drug. His transition from mental-blocked writer, to uber-intelligent broker, to junkie feeling the side effects of the drug, and later to Senatorial candidate was pretty okay.

The rest of the cast was also just that - okay. Serviceable. No wow moments. Then again, apart from some of the visuals, I don't think that this was supposed to be a wow movie.

The girlfriend offered an opinion that probably encapsulated the genre of the movie. It was as if it was an indie film that wasn't an indie film. It lacked the edginess that is somewhat a character of indie films, but the way it was handled, the story-telling, the characters, even the situations, gave off the feel of being an indie film.

In the end, all of this made for one pretty confusing movie. For a movie about being enlightened, it was pretty muddled up.

I rate this flick six NZT tablets out of ten.