wow! What a great movie!

Rating: 8/10 (18 March 2011)

I have wanted to see this movie ever since I saw the first trailer pop up on my home screen for the IMDb app. The trailer made it look amazing and I saw that it was based off of a book. I read the book and absolutely loved it and I decided that the movie was a shoe-in. I saw it on opening day just a few minutes ago and it was just amazing!
Basically the movie starts off with our main guy, Eddie (Bradley Cooper), about to jump from the building but chooses not to and goes on to tell us his story. He meets up with an ex-brother-in-law who gives him a small pill that allows him to access the rest of his brain in a matter of minutes. Usually it takes us a while to try to remember something that happened to us twenty years ago. With this pill, he can remember that stuff instantly!
But soon his dealer is killed by hit men who wanted the drug (entitled NZT-48). He finds the stash and uses it in the stock market and gets 2 million dollars. This brings in a man named Carl Van Loon who hires Eddie as his associate. It's funny because Robert De Niro's character isn't even the main bad guy. It's some Russian dude who wants Eddie's NZT.
But, of course, there are side-effects. After he becomes behind on his dosage, his brain begins to skip time and he can't remember what just happened to him. He later gives a chick a very bad disease that kills her and he hadn't even remembered well enough to tell his very qualified lawyer who was to help him in this case. His stash begins to dwindle so the whole dosage side affect issue becomes a problem, especially with the very dangerous Russian wanting it. He then finds his pills are stolen. He discovers that his lawyer stole them to find out what happened to the chick.
We then finally come back to him about to jump. The Russian breaks in and tries to kill him. Although Eddie manages to kill him instead. Earlier, the Russian mentioned to Eddie that he liquefied it so he could shoot it instead. When Eddie kills him, the blood is the only thing he can use to beat the hit men and get out of there. He drinks it and goes to a man who could help him get to the man who took his stash. He gets it.
The happy ending is that he used scientists to help him "tweak" the NZT so that it won't cause side-effects and he won't need to take it so often.
This was a great movie that was very fast paced, yet somehow slow paced at the same time, since it had felt much longer than 1hour and 45minutes. The ending was very quick and abrupt making it hard to recall, as were some of the other twists, but I still managed to figure it out by paying close attention. Overall, this is a great movie that I would recommend to anyone but young kids who'd be confused throughout the whole thing. Great movie.
5 out of 5. 9 out of 10. See it.