Wonder Drug

Limitless
Director: Neil Burger
Cast: Bradley Cooper, Robert De Niro, Abbie Cornish
Released: March 18, 2011

Imagine you could take a pill and it would let you use one hundred percent of your brain instead of the supposed twenty percent we can only access. That is exactly what happens when Eddie (Cooper), a struggling writer, takes the pill which is offered to him by his ex girl friend's brother. Before he took the pill, he looked like a homeless person, his apartment was a mess, and he hadn't written one word of his story. When he takes the pill, his mind suddenly become clear, he seems to remember everything he ever learned in his entire life, and he finishes his book in four days. He also gets a sleek and clean makeover.

When the effect wears off, he knows he has to get more pills, but his ex's brother has been killed, but Eddie manages to find them in his oven. Taking one pill a day makes him smart and powerful. He can suddenly become fluent in a foreign language, do difficult math problems in his head, and know the answer to everything at anytime. He even states he has a four-digit IQ which is just ridiculous. If you had a four-digit IQ, then you would be the smartest person in the world and everyone else around you would seem quite stupid in comparison. You would be bored by everything too if you had an IQ that high! At one point in the movie, his girlfriend takes a pill because she's carrying a stash of them around for Eddie and is being chased by one of the bad guys who wants to kill her, so she takes a pill so she'll know what to do. At that point I was thinking that she was going to start taking them too and they were going to become the most self-important and pretentious couple in the world. Luckily she didn't like that she didn't feel like herself, so that's the only time she takes it.

This movie has an interesting premise, but it doesn't quite deliver in the end. There are too many holes that aren't mended by the end. During one scene when he's on the drugs, Eddie goes through an entire evening only remembering snippets of it. He finds out a girl he remembers being with was killed and apparently somebody saw him leave the hotel room where her body was found. He hires people to remove any of his fingerprints from the room, but we never found out if he murdered her or if it was someone else. Also, it sounded like the drug wasn't going to be made anymore, so I don't know how he was going to keep this charade going of being smart and powerful if he didn't have the thing that was making him rich and powerful anymore.

Interesting premise, but falls flat. I will give the film props for being the first time I've ever seen a child being used as a weapon (well technically, the ice skaters were the weapon, but a kid was in the ice skates when they were being used!)