Movie Doubles - 'The Hangover Part II' & 'Limitless'

Hello Bradley Cooper

I haven't done one of these for a while for no real  reason other than it's quite hard to get excited about films lately. Maybe I'm getting jaded like some critic but the n-th time you see a movie about some action-hero type who is set up and betrayed by his handler, it gets too obvious to bother writing up a crit. Yes, that would be both 'The American' and 'The Mechanic' for which I sort of got tempted to write a movie double but never got to it. In the mean time the world has offered up other things to think about so I've let this little routine drift, but hey I actually got hassled to  do one properly recently so here I am.

Today's double has Bradley Cooper as the lynchpin. Bradley Cooper of course had a huge breakthrough with his role in 'The Hangover' playing handsome Phil who gets tasered in the face (amongst other indignities). Since then he's made a couple of films like 'The A-Team', but 'Limitless' is the first film where he is starring as the lead actor in a thriller which is the test of all male leads. The result is a little mixed so more of that in a moment.

As usual, here's the full spoiler warning. It's hard to talk about film without actually engaging with the details, so you know the usual deal.

The Lost Memory

Amazingly, 'The Hangover' manages to cover all the plot points from the first film and rehashes it in such a way as to riff on the old jokes. It's funnier if you've seen the first. Significant amongst the tropes is the central trope where all three main characters cannot recall what happened during a wild night. What's very strange about 'Limitless' is that part of the plot features an 18hour block which goes by in a drug induced blur which the main character played by Cooper - Eddie' - cannot recall. That makes it 3 films in 2 years where Bradley Cooper has had to play a character who is desperately trying to recall a wild night. Don't dismiss this trope as it seems to be an emerging theme of the cinema of our time.

The Ancient Greeks had an interesting notion that all of life was a process of remembering. So we are all born as a blank slate and as we go through life, we learn something, but what this actually represented was that we were remembering things we had forgotten. now, this might seem far fetched to you, but both the 'Hangover' movies and 'Limitless' are kinds of bildungsroman movies. By that I mean they are films in which the characters learn about the world and their place in them.

In all three entries, Bradley Cooper goes through a bit where he has to act out the problem of trying to recall what he has done in a blur, and then reconstruct the events so they make sense.

Knowledge As Gestalt

What's interesting that emerges out of both films is that knowledge for the characters in both films is made up of bits and pieces of information that do not fit together at the beginning of the movie; but as the movie winds its way to the end, the fragments begin to assemble or cohere into an understanding for the characters. As such, both films feature moments of 'aha' or 'Eureka' or the figurative penny dropping. Alan has a revelatory moment of lucidity, meditating in the monastery, but his vision is populated with children representing adults. Stu has his ultimate assembly of meaning, just as he did in the first film, and he figures out exactly what happened to Teddie.

'Limitless' also involves it self heavily with what knowledge can do, and how it works; the problem for this film is that while the bits and pieces do come together from all parts of the consciousness, you don't get the feeling that the writers understood what they were dealing with. As such, the film veers back and forth between whether the drug is good for you or not, and you never get to understanding it the way Eddie does at the end. There's a feeling of ambivalence about the drug, which means there's a feeling of ambivalence about knowledge, all the while the story progresses. It would have been a better film if it had something to say about knowledge or even performance enhancing drugs.

In any case, Cooper seems to have landed in 3 films where knowledge is one of the themes and yet he seems totally at odds with any kind of philosophical introspection. Even when playing a down and out writer, he doesn't seem a whole lot introspective. He seems more extroverted by nature and so the choices he makes on screen don't seem overly epistemological. but maybe that's a good thing - after all, who goes to the movies for epistemology?

The Severed Body Parts

Another weird correlation between 'The Hangover Part II' and 'Limitless' are the severed finger and hands. 'The Hangover Part II' kicks off the learning/remembering with the discovery of a severed finger, presumably belonging to Teddie. The finger has a ring on it from Stanford University, but more to the point it is the clue that metaphorically and para-logically leads the main characters to discover the whereabouts of Teddie.

The severed hands in 'Limitless' belong to Eddie's bodyguards. It is a sign sent to him by some East European mobster, but the hands reprises themselves towards the end of the film as the mobsters open the safe.

In each film, the severed limbs serve to illustrate not just the genuine threats laid against the main characters, but also as ciphers of a kind of brutality. It used to be bad enough that bad guys would beat you up or torture you with electricity or water, but the severed limbs evoke dismemberment and feed the castration anxiety. It's no accident that Hollywood has decided severed hands is exactly the kind of quick horror that should be delivered. Or perhaps maybe these things are occurring more and more often, that it no longer is the brutal act that it used to be.

The Criminal Element In Proximity

It's strange how both 'The Hangover' movies and 'Limitless' involve criminals as part of the plot. 'The Hangover' series features a weird Asian by the name of Chow, who proudly proclaims he is an international criminal. 'Limitless' partly swings around the loan shark mobster from East Europe. In both instances the main characters place themselves in the orbit of these crooks, only to find they have ugly consequences.

Now, if you're asking me, I don't get this plot device. I buy it in the first 'Hangover' movie because I've seen 'Casino' and it's about Vegas and why wouldn't there be a gamble-happy Asian mobster there? In the second film, it is clear that he is back for comic value, but at the same time you wonder about the necessity to the plot. Unsurprisingly Chow spends half the film comatose in an ice box so as not to complicate the plot too much. The motive is weak, but it sort of makes sense.

The criminal gang element in 'Limitless' makes far less sense. The smart drug enhanced Eddie goes to a mobster to borrow 100k because banks won't lend him money. It's such a stupid move it makes you wonder if the author of the book this film is based upon bothered to think through the scenario or whether he gratuitously wanted the mobster in the story so he can have a criminal threat. The logic doesn't even make sense. If you could turn $800 into $7,500 by day trading for 2 days, you can turn that into $100,000 in a week.

What's weird about 'Limitless' is that Eddie might have murdered a girl in his drug-induced fugue but gets away with it. he beats up a bunch of guys in a subway station, badly. He even stabs to death the East European mobster during a break in. And he gets away with murder there too. And you're never sure what these violent moments on and off screen are supposed to represent other than gratuitous action cues. Compared to that, the straight up violent nature of criminal Bangkok is far more plausible within the story of 'The Hangover Part II'.

So Is This Working For You?

Which all leads us back to Bradley Cooper. I'm not sure what I'm seeing in this actor as a leading man. I have no idea if his career is about to go ballistic or whether he is enjoying a moment in the sun on the back of a couple of hit movies. The question one should ask is what other roles can you see him in and suddenly I'm not so sure. Maybe he's doomed to head back to the Rom Coms. Maybe he's going to play a Super Hero from the Marvel stable but I can't imagine which one. Can he play action star? He seemed okay in 'The A-Team' but not overwhelmingly charismatic. He hasn't shown a whole lot of range yet, and maybe it's not there. I'm actually drawing a blank as to who he reminds me of but he's sure not a new type. He seems light on drama chops and not terribly convincing in the fight scene so it's a bit of a mystery.