Limitless

We begin as Eddie’s life is all but completely collapsing around him. Eddie is a struggling author who cannot think his way through his next book. He has an accomplished girlfriend who is fed up with his lack of ambition or direction, leaving him in the dust and unable to pay his rent. Is it any wonder that he took up Vernon’s offer for a newfangled drug when his life is in shambles? NZT-48 sounds like the perfect solution for all of his problems, and it is. Eddie was already intelligent and capable, but writer’s block has crippled him. With Lindy (Abbie Cornish) dumping him in the first act, he crosses paths with Vernon (Johnny Whitworth), looking for the entire world like the successful pharmaceutical consultant he tried to sell himself as. With the film essentially opening up to a premonition of Eddie standing on the ledge of a high-rise balcony, we have an inkling of where this tale will go.

Limitless eschews the “10%” theory in the most hilarious manner imaginable. Eddie’s drug-dealing ex-brother-in-law was clearly lying about everything in his spiel. It’s easy to accept that none of what Vernon said was true and that he was merely lying through the conversation to score another customer. After all, he had his sister on this drug, too. Eddie takes the drug and almost immediately notices his whole world opening up. His productivity increases exponentially, allowing him to clean up his world – literally and figuratively. Hell, he finishes his novel in less than a day and delivers it to his bewildered, suspicious agent.

Of course, everything has a price, especially regarding drugs. NZT has its lion’s share of drawbacks if one isn’t careful. Shocking literally no one, the FDA has not approved the drug, and it comes with some severe consequences that affect the body and the mind. We see the adverse effects that NZT can have when we are formally introduced to Eddie’s ex-wife, Melissa (Anna Friel). She is a nervous wreck who cannot focus on anything for longer than a few moments. She is genuinely the stereotypical visage of a recovering drug addict – messy and unkempt and struggling to get through her life as normally as humanly possible. Melissa is one of the lucky ones, as most of Vernon’s client list is as dead as he is after his second scene.

Still, NZT grants particular abilities to those who use it, allowing one to have perfect recall, even for information only briefly glimpsed. This also allows somebody who is already reasonably intelligent to connect several disparate threads of information, which Eddie uses to dominate the stock market in record time and turn a few hundred dollars into millions practically overnight. It is with Eddie Morra that we see the most dramatic and effective change, and this is because we are seeing the story through his eyes.

Eddie struggles with the downsides when its effects run out, but he is a force to be reckoned with while it’s active. His intellect, ego, and ability were top tier and only crippled by a mental block that afflicts all writers at some point.

We also see how the drug affects people of varying intelligence through Vernon and Gennady (Andrew Howard). Vernon’s presence in Limitless is fleeting, but he can successfully weave together false statements and half-truths to draw in a laundry list of clients. How Vernon was before NZT is only implied, but as a low-level drug dealer in a film, the implications are relatively straightforward. Eddie goes to Gennady, a loan shark, so he can have more capital on hand to make more money. This is where Eddie’s own arrogance comes in. Despite increasing intellect, he forgets to pay back the loan shark, forcing him to give Gennady one of his pills on top of the money he owes him. Gennady’s intelligence vastly improved after taking NZT, and he is plotting to move from being a loan shark into a more lucrative export-import business. Considering he has goons on hand who are not afraid to break into a luxury apartment, it’s highly doubtful that Gennady was leaving a life of crime behind.

This doesn’t even truly capture the full breadth of the real story, as Eddie falls into the thrall of an influential businessman in the energy sector. Robert De Niro plays Carlos “Carl” Van Loon, a shrewd businessman who finds Eddie’s insight dangerously useful. At his right hand is Donald “Don” Pierce (Robert Burke), who is dubious about Eddie’s ability to seemingly foresee a potential merger with Henry Atwood’s company. Henry Atwood (Richard Bekins) is offhandedly mentioned as having been nowhere on Forbes’ radar a handful of years before the film’s primary setting happens, giving us our first hints. Long before Eddie and Atwood cross paths, he is being followed by a man in a tan coat (Tomas Arana). Even with NZT, though, the aftereffects of coming off of it portend disaster, as Eddie is thrown into the lurch by the suspicious death of a model, requiring the assistance of a powerful and cutthroat lawyer, Morris Brandt (Ned Eisenberg).

As Limitless continues to unfold, Eddie finds himself at the center of a vast conspiracy, with seemingly no escape. This is where Limitless finds its true strength. By the time Eddie notices anything suspicious happening around him, it’s already too late. People have circled around him, watching him closely before moving in for what he has. The man in the tan coat is central to this, representing Eddie’s most pressing threat before the climax.

This leads to a harrowing encounter between Lindy and the man in the tan coat, who fatally dispatches two big, burly men she seeks aid from. It is through Lindy that we receive our only unvarnished assessment of the drug – she felt like a completely different person, and she didn’t like it at all.

The second act of Limitless focuses squarely on the dynamic between Eddie and Carl, as the latter draws the former into his web for personal reasons (money, it’s always money). While the conspiracy surrounding Eddie is more of an obvious threat, Carl Van Loon provides the carrot – a lure that Eddie cannot hope to ignore. But NZT gives him certain advantages, allowing him to lay the groundwork for his eventual jump from the Van Loon ship.

Through this conspiracy, all of the pieces begin to fall into place. NZT has been around for a long time – at least two years if one character’s meteoric rise is anything to go off of. Yet, it is having difficulty succeeding because of its fatality rate. What shocked me was that Eddie was the only person who seemed capable or willing to investigate the drug and potentially perfect it. Consider his primary opponent, who is on his deathbed near the film’s end despite having a two-year head start. Rather than tinker with the drug alone, he sent a litany of goons after Eddie, costing himself precious time.

At its core, Limitless is a science-fiction film. It manages to weave together a compelling story through the eyes of a man who is down on his luck and suddenly hits the proverbial jackpot. It is the kind of wish fulfillment that audiences tend to enjoy, allowing us to imagine what we might do if we were put into the same situation. In my humble opinion, it makes it a win.