Thursday, April 7, 2011

Limitless and Pointless

I did see Neil Burger's Limitless two weekends ago, but I didn't quite know what to say about it and thus it lingered in review limbo for quite some time. 
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I know that Burger's tunnel zooms and yellowed filters and head-rush filming style certainly suited the material and that I did get a bit of a kick out of watching Bradley Cooper's washed-up writer character pop pills and become a genius novelist, analyst, street fighter, etc. 
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But somewhere between Abbie Cornish throw-looping a pint-sized ice-skater and Cooper slurping up a puddle of blood, Limitless just sort of lost me with its apparent lack of direction which weakly concludes with a perfunctory epilogue that's like something out of a Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episode. 
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In the end, I rather agree with those who describe the film as a cinematic drug trip - fun while it lasts, but once it's over, a fruitless, shallow high. It's like Timur Bekmambetov's Wanted without curved bullets and a secret sect of thread-weaving assassins. Limitless actually had me wishing for the tired but pulpy, throwback mechanizations of Jaume-Collet Serra's Unknown. [C-]

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