"Limitless" (2011)

This film is an exploration of a great idea right up until the last scene, then something either went wrong or test audiences botched the process up.

What if there was a means that enabled us to operate at our full potential? (Assuming for a minute that we had a potential greater than that which we are already fulfilling. The whole “you only use X% of your brain” claim is not right. It capitalizes on a misconception about how our brains work.) In this story, we get to see one way that this idea could play out and it isn’t very pretty.

That is because the story-tellers understand something very important. Our problem as humanity is not that we aren’t tapping into our full potential. It is that our potential to do evil is unescapable. If we somehow maximized our abilities, it would likely also maximize our baser instincts and impulses as well. Rather than wish that we could manipulate the world around us, we should hope that we could control ourselves. We can’t, but there is help for that problem as well. This film isn’t concerned with that story.

The end of this film almost destroys every moment leading up to it, however. It is as if they decide in the last 60 seconds to throw out every point they were trying to make.