Limitless (DVD/Blu-Ray) - Dir. Neil Burger. Starring Bradley Cooper, Abbie Cornish, Robert De Niro.
Mediocre thriller that spends most of its time playing in the superpowers sandbox.
Upon discovering a drug that dramatically increases his intelligence, memory, and focus, writer Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper) sets out to change his life and the world.
The movie's repetition of the old myth that humans use only 10 percent of their brains (20 percent here, which I guess is an improvement) is an early clue that this is not an intellectual film. The honeycomb of plot holes that develops later on confirms it.
From the drug, Eddie apparently gains a "four digit IQ" and perfect recall of every event in his life.
As for the consequences these changes would have on a person's emotional and mental well-being, the writers don't get much further than "It would make everything awesome!" There are the token side effects required for the film's token anti-drug message, sure, but these are utterly forgotten by the time the third act rolls around (along with a rather important plot thread about a murder).
Imagine Flowers for Algernon if instead of an insightful look into human happiness and enlightenment it were a brainless thriller.
With credible personal and psychological drama off the table, Limitless turns to contrived danger for its tension. Eddie needs money, but decides his current method of tripling his investments in the stock market every day isn't quite fast enough. Instead, with his immense intellect he hatches a plan to borrow $100,000 from a loan shark, then forgets to pay him back. This dime store villain's pursuit of Eddie is the movie's central conflict: one that could have been shoehorned into any script of the past hundred years. A source of tension even vaguely tailored to the premise was apparently too much to ask.
While I'm complaining, can I say that I'm really sick of every movie these days opening with a scene from near the end and then jumping back to the beginning with a "Six months/two weeks/44,000 chronons earlier" message? Is this what our collective attention span has been reduced to? Do we have to be assured at the start of every movie that yes, this story really is going somewhere?
What was I talking about again? Oh yeah. Limitless. Don't see it.
Rated PG-13 for dangerous brain use.
2.5 out of 5
Tekken (DVD/Blu-Ray) - Dir. Dwight H. Little. Starring Jon Foo, Kelly Overton, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa
Ludicrous characters battle for unclear reasons in a video game cash-in.
Tekken's plot is not something anyone needs to concern themselves about. There's a martial arts tournament put on by a man with a very silly haircut, and by winning it, our hero Jin (Jon Foo, who you've never heard of, like all the actors in this movie) can apparently save the world in some murky way. As is traditional in The Future, the tournament has no weight or gender classes, and for some reason one guy gets to fight with full armor and a sword.
Jin signs up to seek revenge over the death of his mother Jun, whose 30-second appearance before getting blown up is stretched to about 20 minutes through repeating flashbacks. Jin seems to have lived a pretty uneventful life, because he turns to the same two or three memories for inspiration every time he's on the losing end of a fight. This happens a lot.
Let there be no doubt: this is a bad movie, and one that seems to come straight out of 1991. But for a poorly-conceived low-budget video game film that was rushed out after sitting in development hell for a decade, it's surprising how well it hits the notes of the genre. It's the kind of movie Van Damme might have done in his prime; the kicks to the face are as good as you'll find anywhere, the villains are over-the-top, and the sex scenes are gratuitous. Failures of storytelling that would be painful elsewhere are funny here. It's a cheesy return to the action films of two decades ago, and that's not entirely a bad thing.
Rated R for Joe Lieberman.
3 out of 5
