Limitless: Perpetual Plot Holes

Limitless is not a film about subtlety. As the bad guys close in, one drug-induced character ends a chase through a busy park by bursting onto an ice rink and using a small child as a deadly weapon. It’s a scene that sums up the ridiculously silly yet reasonably gripping “limitless.”

Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper), who like all badly paid underperforming writer stereotypes, has long scraggy hair and cheap looking clothes. It was like looking in a mirror. Having failed to meet a deadline for his unconvincing idea and dumped by his long-suffering girlfriend Lindy (Abbie Cornish), he finds himself on the verge of leaving the big city and joining his dad’s boring business. This is when he bumps into his ex-wife’s brother, a shady drug dealer called Vernon (Johnny Whitworth) who offers him a yet-to-be-approved drug called NZT.

Suddenly, Eddie sees more clearly than ever. He writes half his novel and manages to seduce his landlord’s wife with his newly remembered knowledge of old law texts. Rushing back to get more of this “wonder drug,” Eddie is shocked when Vernon is murdered in mysterious circumstances just an hour after visiting him, so he takes his stash, and plans his new life.

And so, begins a very well worked premise. He manages to complete his novel and then find his way into the stock market, earning millions, winning back his girlfriend and landing a job with Carl Van Loon (Robert De Niro). Unfortunately, there are side effects. Blackouts start happening, where Eddie is almost unable to account for his whereabouts, apart from small recollections. On top of that, he is pursued by a mysterious figure that had connections to Vernon, as well as a Russian loan shark who has become hooked on NZT and demands he supply him with more. Oh, and did I mention Eddie also becomes a suspect in a murder trial? Yeah that happens too… we wouldn’t want the film to be “boring.”

To be fair to Limitless, it manages to juggle all these balls in the air quite well for the majority of the film. It’s a film of decent ideas and certainly can’t be blamed for being tedious or self interested. There is a lot at stake, especially after a midpoint meeting with his ex-wife, who warns that going cold turkey could be even worse than carrying on with the drug. This was the film’s best piece of writing; Eddie becomes a runaway train with no breaks, heading for disaster, illness, and death.

However, when a premise like this comes around, there are usually going to be problems. The main protagonist often has a problem that needs to be solved, or a flaw that gets him into trouble; otherwise the movie becomes snooze fest. When your main character takes a magic pill to make himself the smartest man in the world, you can’t exactly have him fall down a manhole. The blackouts help, but there are moments in the film where you wonder why Eddie hasn’t made a little bit more effort to solve some of the long term problems of the scheme. The film’s logic is mainly tight, but there are moments when it frays at the edges. It also commits a cinematic crime of playing the ‘no phone signal’ card later on; it actually caused the guy behind me in the theatre to groan loudly.

The biggest problem with Limitless, however, is that the ending is absolutely horrendous. First, the apartment scene is wrapped up by coincidence, a second cinematic crime. Secondly, the whole business with the drugs stumbles to its conclusion, happening off screen and needing to be telegraphed to the audience through forced exposition. And the dialogue is volatile at the best of times; if a member of the audience mishears or misunderstands a line, then it breaks our train of thought. It leaves the film at the mercy of the audience. And we’re not entirely reliable; I have the attention span of the man-from-memento crossed with a springer spaniel at the best of times.

That could probably be blamed on one too many plots needing to be wrapped up, but that doesn’t account for an ending that misses the general point. Still, perhaps that’s what Limitless sets out to be. It’s silly, it’s flawed, and there are logic gaps, which the film works hard to sort out but doesn’t quite camouflage. It is at the very least interestingly entertaining, and a far better film than I thought it was going to be… at least until I got home and I started thinking.

Limitless had one or two plot holes that it managed to hide adequately well, but one glaring question still lingered:

Why the hell didn’t he track down the drug makers? If he had so much money, he could have bought the firm and started work on refining the drug. He does pay a scientist to replicate the drug, which stops it from ruining the film, but it just seemed like a lot of bother could be saved in the first place if he spent a bit of time on Google.