'Limitless' excites audiences, fails to impress

"Limitless" is a strange movie. It's not that the concept is particularly bizarre: man stumbles upon super powers, struggles with their inevitable drawbacks and eventually masters them. That is most comic book storylines in a nutshell. It is the execution of "Limitless" and specifically its cheery ending that left me somewhat deflated. Movies like "Limitless" aren't supposed to end with the hero living a healthy, if somewhat extraordinary, life, but that is exactly what Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper) does. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. You reap what you sow. These are time-tested adages but "Limitless" chooses to ignore them, and in the end the movie feels too clean.

The film begins with Eddie's girlfriend, Lindy (Abbie Cornish), dumping him. Eddie is a writer who can't write, and the stress of his seemingly endless writer's block sends him on a downward spiral and drives Lindy away from him. However, when Eddie runs across his ex-wife's brother, Vernon, (Johnny Whitworth) who gives him a pill he calls NZT, Eddie's life changes forever. NZT allows him to access 100 percent of his brain, giving him a superhuman capacity to think, reason, learn and remember. This comes in handy when someone kills Vernon. Eddie quickly uses NZT to finish his book, get back with Lindy and quickly become the smartest stockbroker on Wall Street. Eddie is planning to use his powers to get money and change the world, although we're never quite sure what that means.

In the meantime, NZT has some pretty powerful side effects. Eddie loses consciousness for hours on end, and it is during one of these bouts that he appears to kill a woman in a hotel room. Eddie attempts to stop taking NZT, but this merely increases the side effects. While all of this is happening, Eddie is trying to maintain a stash of NZT, stay away from some mobsters who inadvertently got a hold of the drug and want more from him, keep his relationship with Lindy healthy and broker one of the biggest mergers in the history of capitalism. Of course, this all comes tumbling down, and Eddie is attacked by the mobsters, who he narrowly escapes from. After that, however, everything starts going his way. And that's where "Limitless" falters.

In the end, Eddie is running for a New York senate seat and, despite being off of NZT, is still reaping the benefits. Even when his old boss at the brokerage firm Carl Van Loon (Robert De Niro), who owns the makers of NZT, attempts to blackmail him, Eddie is five steps ahead of him. Without the side effects of the drug, which he's managed to eliminate by tailoring NZT, Eddie is on the way to a New York senate seat and probably the White House.

Eddie wins, basically. He gets absolute power without being corrupted. He doesn't reap what he sows. It is this deus ex machina that left me a bit disturbed. "Limitless" went to great lengths to demonstrate Eddie's reliance on NZT, even to the point of making him drink the blood of a recently killed mobster in order to ingest some of the drug and escape. It seemed that he only had two choices: get off of the drug and die, or keep on it and deal with the side effects. "Limitless" lets him walk through door three and in doing so loses any chance of becoming a film with any real message. In retrospect, I did consider that the screenwriters might have hinted that Eddie was still on NZT in the final scene when he spoke a foreign language to a waiter, something he had done earlier while on NZT.  But this move is so subtle that, even if true, it had an almost unnoticeable impact.

Cooper was at the top of his game in "Limitless," and I wouldn't be surprised if he continued to land A-list roles. He was well supported by De Niro and Cornish. The method the film utilized to demonstrate Eddie's superior consciousness, a combination of fisheye and interesting zoom shots, was compelling and unique. The movie was thrilling, exciting and dark, but ultimately shallow.

"Limitless" is entertaining and raises some very interesting questions, but, by choosing to go with a squeaky clean Hollywood ending and cliché plot points (foreign mobsters, etc.), it finishes as just a mediocre film.