Limitless: Idiots to the max!

There are some movies that you learn to love over time. The more you think about it, the better it gets. You examine all the layers and realize how complex the story is and an appreciation grows. This movie is the exact opposite of that.

On its face, this is a thoroughly entertaining movie. As it progresses, however, it gets increasingly stupid. And the more I think about it, the more problems I have with this movie.

It starts off with Bradley Cooper looking like a homeless drug addict.

Will work for hairbrush

His girlfriend is sick and tired of telling her friends that he's not actually homeless, so she dumps him and moves on to greener and cleaner pastures.

B. Coop runs into his ex-brother-in-law/drug dealer and gets to try a new drug that helps users access all of their brain power at once. I guess free samples aren't just for Costco anymore. Anyway, Coop is super depressed because his life sucks and since he has nothing to lose he takes the mystery drug called NZT. AND IT'S AMAZING. The drug gives him OCD symptoms and he cleans his apartment and then writes part of a novel.

Whoa, I can read the Matrix.

The NZT finally got Coop off his lazy ass and he realizes that he wants to be productive all the time. Instead of getting his shit together, he goes begging for more drugs. To nobody's surprise, his dealer gets killed before Coop can get his drugs. But it takes him about 30 seconds to find the stash, so life is good. The cops don't even see the bulging bag of pills shoved down his pants, and he's free to go.

With this enormous stash of miracle drugs, Coop can do anything; he charms the pants off everyone he meets, learns new languages and makes millions in the stock market. He even gets his girlfriend back because he finally took a shower.

Life is peachy, but only with the drugs. Without the drugs he's just a big dummy again. Eventually he he starts taking two pills a day and then he has black out episodes. For example, he couldn't remember how he got from one part of town to another, or whether or not he killed a hooker in a hotel room. That's annoying!

Instead of trying to figure out if he actually murdered someone, he tries to find out if the pills are going to kill him. And survey says: yes, definitely going to die. And the kicker is that he'll die from withdrawal, so he can't stop taking the NZT. What a dilemma!

Since he might die, B. Coop confesses to his girlfriend and makes her pick up his stash. Another NZT addict follows her and tries to kill her for the drugs. She speed dials Coop and he tells her take NZT to help her figure out what to do. It works like a charm. She looks around to find something to defend herself with, and she definitely makes the right choice:

She swings the little girl around and slices her attacker in the face with the ice skates. The little girl is probably scarred for life. Good job!

More people try to kill Coop for the drugs, but fueled with NZT he can outsmart them all. And actually, even without the drugs he kills one of them who was on NZT, which makes absolutely no sense based on the premise of this movie. The drugs make it so you can figure out everything faster than everyone else, but a drug addict experiencing withdrawal symptoms is somehow able to outsmart a guy feeling the full effects of the drugs? I don't think so.

Anyway, Coop somehow manages to kill his NZT-fueled attacker, and to get high again he has another brilliant plan: HE DRINKS THE BLOOD FROM THE GUY HE JUST KILLED. Ewwww. He laps it up like a dog. And even though Coop was using two pills a day, somehow a few sips of blood pump him up like a full dose... huh? Movie science blows my mind.

A year later, Coop has forgotten his blood-drinking, hooker-killing days and is running for senator of New York, and then maybe for president.

Actually, he's pretty tame for a politician

Running for president can take a long time, and there was only a limited stash of NZT to keep him smart/alive. But no sweat, Coop's drug-infused brain solved the problem: he hired a chemist to make more drugs. Or maybe he weaned himself off, while somehow maintaining his super-enhanced brain power (I'm pretty sure that was a lie). It was an ambiguous ending and I don't really know which one actually happened. Whatever, I don't even care. I just want to know when his gay sex scandal will surface.

Sucker Punch: A blow to the brain

I watched this movie and I don't know what the hell just happened. It's more confusing than Inception. But instead of a maze within a dream within a dream down an elevator, it's a turd wrapped in a shitty screenplay in a pinball machine. Oh, and it has the worst soundtrack I've ever heard in my life.

Basically, if you manage to keep watching past the opening montage, don't expect things to get better.

But the cast looked so promising!

Based on how I understood the plot, Babydoll (Emily Browning) loses her mother and is left to the care of her abusive (step?)father. He tries to kill and/or rape her and her sister, and Babydoll escapes and tries to shoot him. The trajectory on that bullet defies physics; it somehow manages to miss the target two feet directly in front of her, hit a hanging lightbulb and then swerve to the floor where her sister is sitting and kills her sister instead. Oops.

Babydoll pusses out and doesn't shoot her (step?)father, so he takes her to a mental institution. The doctors talk about giving her a lobotomy and then a few moments later she's hanging out with a bunch of other patients,  but they seem more like whores than patients. And apparently they kind of are whores.

The girls are forced to dance for guys, and Carla Gugino is their dance instructor. She makes Babydoll dance, but instead of seeing her dance we get to see her fantasy of killing poorly rendered CGI robots for a few minutes. She also dreams up some old man who tells her how to escape the asylum/brothel. After killing the robots she returns to reality in the dance studio and apparently she was dancing so seductively that even the girls got boners.

This is even better than Step Up

Some creep with a weird moustache talks about how much money he is going to make by having Babydoll dance for the "high roller," but little does he know that she is planning her exit and she wants to bring the other whores with her. They're kinda skeptical, but they go for it anyway because it's hard out there for a pimp mentally unstable prostitute.

Babydoll's elaborate plan involves photocopying a map, obtaining a lighter, and stealing a kitchen knife and a key. And I thought Azkaban had tight security!

In order to steal all of this shit the whores make Babydoll dance in front of the guys to distract them. When she dances it brings everyone into her fantasy world where the old man from her first dream guides them and gives great advice, such as, "Don't ever write a check with your mouth you can't cash with your ass."

In the fantasy land they perceive their tasks to be like combat missions and they use samurai swords and robot suits to kill zombie Nazis. (I know, I can't believe how stupid that sounds either.)

Can we paint Hello Kitty on the tank next?

I guess these action scenes are supposed to be badass and make the girls look powerful, but that is the worst impersonation of feminism I have ever seen. They're essentially comparing pickpocketing to a war zone in terms of difficulty for these girls, and all the while they're dressed like they're into Sailor Moon cosplay.

Cool gun charms, bro

Anyway, somehow they manage to get through these grueling tasks and get what they need, but every once in a while a whore gets stabbed or shot and dies. I don't really understand how Mr. Moustache manages to have so much control over these girls because he's about the same size as Vanessa Hudgens and his idea of intimidation is raising his voice like he's upset that his roommate didn't take out the trash.

Ugh, gross! Why do I always have to be the one to shoot the whores?

The moustachioed brothel owner eventually tries to rape Babydoll, but she stabs him, steals his key and gets away rape-free. Babydoll and the only other surviving whore, Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), manage to get out of the asylum/brothel, but a gaggle of dudes block the path to the gate. Babydoll martyrs herself for the sake of Sweet Pea and this time she distracts the guys by kicking them in the balls.

Out of nowhere, Babydoll is back in the asylum, in a chair ready to get a lobotomy from Jon Hamm. He hammers an ice pick into her brain and then Carla Gugino walks in, but apparently she's a psychologist and not a dance instructor. And the moustachioed brothel owner is an employee at the asylum. Hey, I guess they really were in the asylum all along! Ugh.

This fantasy within a fantasy scooped out of a catbox business was trying way too hard to be cool and clever. No, Zack Snyder, I don't want to go back and catch all the clues separating fantasy from reality and talk about how smart you were for planting all of them. I think I'd keep more brain cells if I just got a lobotomy. Jon Hamm, where's that ice pick?