Flying high and crash landing

Rating: 5/10 (29 April 2011)

Limitless has pretty much all the ingredients of a good thriller, with a charismatic cast and at first what seems to be a good story. I felt I was watching a really good movie until the last ten minutes, when it seems the story writers themselves ran out of the miracle drug. The last sequence is simply bad; it makes little sense to carry the story forward in the viewer's mind when exiting the cinema, and it may also be seen as condoning drug abuse. And why Van Loon was all of a sudden a bad guy is incoherent with the rest of the storyline. To me, the ending destroyed the whole movie. Everything (or at least most) up till then was well thought through and coherent in its own way (apart from what actually happened to the dead model and why the bodyguard/henchman was on the list of people using the drug as well as why was sitting on the bench next to Eddie when he called him). Too bad they couldn't patch together a good ending to an otherwise promising movie.