Monday, March 28, 2011

Theater Whore: Unlimited


I wasn’t super excited to see this movie. I had seen the trailer and it had me hooked until it looked like it was becoming this kinda chase film. Oh, don’t you love bad marketing? The trailer actually misleads you but not in a good way. Lots of movies the past few years either feature scenes that aren’t in the movie or flat out show you the entire film. This one says “This is what happens!” and makes me not want to see it.

The movie stars Bradley Cooper (The Hangover, Alias, A-Team) as Eddie Morra, a lazy writer who gets dumped by his girlfriend played by Abbie Cornish (Sucker Punch, Bright Star). She knows he can be better but he just cant. Eddie bumps into his ex wife’s brother Vernon played by Johnny Whitworth (3:10 To Yuma, Empire Records, Gamer). Vernon offers him a clear little pill to take that will change his life.

He takes the pill and it literally blows his mind. He finishes writing a book he’s been working years on in four days. He finally cleans his apartment. He bangs the landlord’s wife (played by T.V Carpio, one of many hurt during the Spiderman Broadway musical). You know. The usual. After heading to Vernon’s place to get more pills he finds him dead with a bullet in his noggin. Stealing what’s left of the pills he finds he takes off and begins planning his new life. He is starting to make money but not fast enough. He makes a deal with someone for $100,000 as a loan.

The movie becomes a series of quick cuts, flashy camera tricks, and lots of fuckery. He gets his ex girlfriend back but becomes dependent on the pills. When he doesn’t take them everything feels slow and he gets sick. He starts working for Robert Dinero (Goodfellas, Raging Bull, Machete) Carl Van Loon in the stock market after plowing his way through his last job. Yes, this all happens very quickly.

As Eddie starts to run out of pills he meets with his ex wife Anna Friel (Sunset Strip, Land Of The Lost) who used to be on the drug he’s taking. She tells him to wean himself off slowly. Of course he doesn’t. He keeps taking it even though its causing blackouts. He means to go home and ends up twenty blocks past it. At a club, a party, a woman he meets and bangs that gets murdered and he’s not sure he did it.

You have to check out mentally quite a bit in this movie. Forgive the fact that the smartest man alive forgets to pay back the guy who threatened to skin him from the waste up and wrap I around his head. The fact that he doesn’t really consider the fact that he will run out of these pills. Or the fact that the dangerous man figures out how to dilute the drug and inject it making it last longer. Yeah.

After killing the dangerous man and drinking his blood (this happened) he kills the other bad guys. Twelve months later he’s running for senate. Yeah. Robert Dinero tries to black mail him telling him that the labs he set up to recreate the drug. Eddie tells him he no longer needs it. He can damn near predict the future now. He gets his girlfriend back even though she had to take the pill to save herself from this guy who has been chasing Eddie the entire film by slicing his face with ice skates a little girl was wearing (that seriously happened).

No need to rush out and see this. It has some good parts but there are things that happen to the smartest man in the world that doesn’t make sense and yanks you right out of the film.

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