Limitless: The Movie

If you haven't seen the movie, it's basically about smart pills. There is a new drug called NZT out on the streets that allows people to recall everything they've ever heard or read or said. Bradley Cooper stars as Eddie Morra, a burnt out loser with long hair, nasty grungy clothes, and a disgusting apartment. His girlfriend left him, because he had no ambition or motivation to finish his novel. By pure coincidence, he meets up with an old friend who used to be where he was. This friend gives Eddie a pill and tells him everything will be okay once he takes it.

Eddie takes it and suddenly his whole world has opened up. Colors are brighter, sounds are better, and he has better awareness of his surroundings. He finishes his novel in a day, he cleaned up his apartment, and he gave himself a makeover. However, being on this pill makes him realize that there's so much more to life than just being a writer. He gets into the finance game and that's where he runs across Robert De Niro.

What follows is Eddie getting into a whole heap of trouble all because of this pill that keeps falling into the wrong hands. His morals and his ethics constantly gets called into question as he keeps  interacting with bad people. All in an effort to keep taking those pills because he becomes a better version of who he used to be.

To learn more and how Robert DeNiro fits into all of it, you'd have to watch the movie.

Limitless: The TV Show

Because it's an adaptation of the movie, it pretty much starts out the same. Jake McDorman stars as Brian Finch, pretty much a burnout as well. He's the baby of a big family where his brothers and sisters are all doing well. He was always the creative kid with big ideas but little motivation. He used to be in a band with his buddies but now it's just him and a guitar. It seemed like everyone was moving on without him.

His dad fell ill because of a heart condition that the doctors couldn't explain. Brian felt useless because he has a very strong connection to his dad. Also through pure coincidence, Brian is doing temp work at a firm where his old bandmate now works. He gives him a pill and tells him that everything will be okay. Brian takes it and realizes that there is a whole world he was missing out on.

Because it's CBS and network television, there has to be a procedural element to it. So while on the pill, Brian figures out what's wrong with his dad. Knowing he becomes a better version of himself he has to find his friend in order to get more pills. In doing so, he gets caught up in a murder and becomes the number one suspect.

I'm not going to tell you the whole sordid details, but basically FBI figures out what Brian is on and recruit him to be an analyst. He tells them he won't do it until they give his father a new liver. At the same time, Bradley Cooper's character from the movie shows up and tells Brian that he developed a sort of booster shot to make people immune from the nasty side effects of the pill. In return for the booster shot, Brian has to take the job with the FBI to find out how far they've gotten with their research into NZT and report back to him. The FBI wants to figure out how Brian can be immune to the side effects. 

What follows is the same moral conundrum that Eddie found himself in in the movie.  Brian is constantly pulled between the agents at the FBI and what Eddie puts him through. 

In order to learn more, you'd have to watch the show.

What I Liked About It:

What I liked was that it wasn't a direct adaptation of the movie, where they basically retold the movie in TV show format. This show and the movie have the same origins, like how a loser got a hold of smart pills and then it led to nothing but trouble.  But how that trouble manifests is where they differ.

What I also liked was how they used the same stylistic choices in order to tell the story. At first the real world is dank and gray and cold and it just looks like a harsh place to live in. It has a bluish tint to it which is a trick Hollywood uses to symbolize that a world is cold. But once you take the pill, the world becomes warm which basically means the world has more color and has a orange tint to it which is reminiscent of the sun. In that subtle shift of color, visually we are able to recognize that these characters have entered a new world. They are able to notice more things and act on that information.

They can recall what they read five years ago almost verbatim, they won't get stuck on a name from a friend 10 years ago. The pills themselves doesn't make you smarter, they are more like a tool to help you learn things faster, understand things faster, and just recall it at a later date. Learning a new language would take less than six hours. Understanding math problems that could help with stocks would be a no-brainer.

The movie kept those stylistic choices contained whereas the show can play around with it a little bit more. There are moments in the show that border on silly. There are scenes where Brian builds scale models of a crime scene in order to understand how it happened. There are scenes where he's literally talking to manifestations of himself, almost like angel and devil on the shoulders, where he tries to work through the moral conundrums that I mentioned. 

There was one episode where he trained his brain to have smells manifest as colors in order to track down a suspect that smelled like a combination of sweat, dirt, and one more thing. There is even an episode where Brian uses ice cream flavors to describe hard-core murderers and rapists and uses hugging and cuddling instead of strangling and killing. So for example, he would say Mr. Pralines and Cream hugged a woman in her apartment.

On the outside the show can be silly and border on camp, but I think too many cop shows take themselves too seriously when they don't have to. The subject matter is obviously dark and twisted, but under the right circumstances like with this show, they  don't have to take themselves seriously and it works. I'm not saying this is a light show where they can't be serious, but Jake has the same quality as Bradley Cooper when they act and it's almost like you want to be their best friend. Their energy and their vibe makes them seem like really cool dudes that you just want to be around.

Jake McDorman is joined by Jennifer Carpenter who also played on Dexter and Hill Harper who's been in multiple roles like Covert Affairs. Their dynamic may seem weird because  Hill Harper is a very serious actor. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen them crack a smile or a joke in any of the roles  that I've seen him in. I'm not a big fan of Jennifer Carpenter, there's something a little off about her acting, almost like it's the same character over and over again. But these three together kind of work.

Brian plays around a lot which makes Jennifer's character and Hill's character frustrated so you have  that odd couple thing going on which is little overplayed, but again it kind of works.

I also liked how they weaved the movie into the show and had Bradley Cooper's character on it intermittently. That's how an adaptation should be rather than a direct copy with barely any, if at all, deviances from it. Because then it makes a show not worth watching since you've already seen it in the movie.

And what's not to like about Bradley Cooper? He is a genuinely talented artist who brings something fresh to every role that he plays. He has an earnest face which makes you believe the words that he speaks and it's not just words on a script that he had to memorize. The movie also had Robert De Niro and how can you not like him? He's so good that I don't have to tell you how good he is. It's just plain name recognition.

And I think that Jake is a worthy successor to Bradley Cooper. He has that same earnestness even when it seems like he can't take anything seriously, you could see in his eyes that he is. So the show works on multiple levels in tandem with the movie. 

What I Didn't Like:

There were times in the movie where some of the cause and effect didn't match. Like how Eddie made the jump from writer to finance. It just sort of seemed too fast for me. It almost made it seem like him being a writer was just an excuse to sit around all day and pretend he has a job. Which would be fine but he already had an advance from a publishing company making it seem like he was serious about it so that didn't make any sense. Maybe I'm harping on it because I'm a writer and I take it very seriously like I'm sure most writers do, even if they haven't written anything in a long time. Writing is a passion that a lot of people share so to just to give it up to get into the numbers game seems like a conflict.

You've heard the old saying, "I'm right brained, not left brained." Which basically means  I am more creatively inclined and work better with art or writing and not numbers or math or science. It suggests that one person can't work with both which of course is false, but personally I suck at math and science and I'm much more comfortable with writing and imagination. Things that aren't necessarily contingent upon fact-based problems. So it just seemed odd that he switched from one to the other. Because even if the smart pills made you understand the finance game, outside of making a quick buck, I just don't think he would have made that leap so quickly.

The progression of the movie pretty much works but again I didn't like how he just kept jumping from career to career. Because after finance he got into politics. How those two are connected I don't know, maybe just through power and that search for it. Bradley had to square off against Robert which is a fun thing to watch because again, this is Robert freaking De Niro that we're talking about. And Bradley does hold his own against him but I won't tell you my favorite part of it,  you'll just have to see it for yourself towards the end of the movie.

In the show, the trick that carried over from the movie was when the character takes the pill and the colors of the world shift. There are times in the show where I get a little confused because I know the character is on the pill, yet the world is still gray. And almost like an afterthought, from one shot to the next, the world is brighter. I don't know if it's just a mistake, if the editor didn't know when he took the pill or if he's still on the pill, or the studio wants to save money on the effect, but it happens multiple times over the course of the show.

I get that Bradley Cooper is busy but if you're going to have him on the show I don't see why it seems like his character has completely changed. He speaks through somebody else, obviously because he's a senator, but it's like he grew malicious between the end of the movie and the start of the show. He tests Brian for his commitment to staying quiet about Eddie's role in the pill almost to extreme lengths just for Brian to prove that he's not a killer, or a snitch, or that he does have a line that he won't cross. Which seemed at odds with his character in the movie. He was never a bad guy and he didn't cross too many lines that corrupted his character but now it seems like he sold a piece of his soul in order to protect his secret.

Like I said, I also have a problem with Jennifer Carpenter's character. She's a good agent, but she spends the whole time rolling her eyes at Brian. Which I get because he plays around but she's just  another caricature of the suffering girlfriend in any romantic comedy or superhero movie. Her back story is interesting because her character has a father who may have been on the pill but he died before she even knew about the pill. That got resolved in like two episodes and she hardly mentions it. It only took Brian to be nosy and pester her for questions that she even opened up and talked about it. And her character bottles up so much and keeps so many things to herself that it's like pulling teeth to get anything from her.

I'm not saying she has to constantly talk about her feelings or what's going on with her because not all women do that and that's fine. But then it makes her seem like a supporting actress rather than the female lead. They tried to give her a relationship with a coworker but she was never affectionate or even seemed like she liked him, it was more like they tried to soften her character but it was clunky and didn't work. She just always has a neutral expression and I never know where her emotions are. Which again is fine, not all women show every emotion, but not showing any is just weird on a TV show.

The same thing goes for Hill Harper's character. It was only just recently that we got to his background and what he has to work with when he leaves the office. The whole show is built around Brian and what he gets up to in his off hours and how many lines he has to blur working with his double spy persona. It also focuses on the case of the week but we have to care about these characters if we're going to keep tuning in week after week. Jake could probably carry the show on his own but then that would be a very boring show. 

The whole concept of a show is to live with your favorite characters season in and season out and care about what they're doing. A movie only gives you two hours to focus on your favorite character but then that's it. You have to wait a year for a sequel to come out if enough people go and see the first movie and sometimes it's not a worthy sequel because it's rushed. But a show gets to take its time and really get to know these characters. But how can we do that if on this show they won't tell us anything about these characters to get to know them.

The Results Are In:

If I absolutely absolutely had to choose a winner between the two, I would have to go with…*Drum roll please*…  THE MOVIE!

You can just tell that they spent time on the movie to get it right, the style choices, the editing choices, the characters and their story, and obviously Bradley Cooper. The story is much more contained and tight and they took care with the type of story they wanted to tell. I adore the show and prefer it but when compared to the movie it seems lacking only because of the style, and the lack of attention to character.

The movie took you on this journey about this loser becoming a somebody and even though some things got murky, I'd like to think that Eddie's character remained the same. The TV show does the same thing but because you're introducing more characters you have to include them and their journey even if they're not the main character.  

Well I hope you enjoyed this showdown and if you did, please let me know here in the comments section or follow me on Facebook and let me know there. You can find the link below and don't forget to check out the movie or the show. It's worth it, I promise!

https://www.facebook.com/Recap-Rewind-Rewatch-751814448187535/