Most Rewatchable Scene
Cooper versus De Niro ending; the come-up with the editor's voicemails; the knowledge montage
In the discussion (19)
Approx. transcript time · 00:27:40Read transcript
- The opening, with him on a ledge saying that for a guy with a four-digit IQ he must have missed something, is nominated as a hook that works even though telling viewers where the story ends often fails; it is called good but not the most rewatchable scene.
- Vern is loved as a great drug dealer who seduces Eddie and then immediately becomes unavailable. — Chris Ryan
- Vernon Gant is identified as Johnny Whitworth, the star of Empire Records.
- The dealer explains the drug to Eddie in a grimy, perfect way; Eddie takes it, has sex with the woman down the hall, cleans his room for three days and says he was blind but now he sees.
- Asked how close someone would have to be to get them to take NZT, the answer is that it would be taken after side-effect questions if a trusted colleague offered it; one late-night Camel Light while writing once felt like a small NZT kick.
- A runner-up choice is the tablet-a-day title line and the montage in which he finishes a book in four days, learns piano, plays blackjack, has sex with models, diagnoses tumors, learns languages and kung fu, holds court with business elites, cliff dives and trades stocks, all in about 10 minutes.
- The cliff dive did not look CGI'd, and it is a jackknifed, non-professional dive slamming into the water.
- The holding-court scenes are loved, though things-are-going-well sequences are always hard to pull off; a joke imagines Chris holding court about the 2022 World Cup with seven experts.
- The short subway fight, with five people wanting to fight him at once, shows Cooper could have had his own Jason Bourne version, but he never made a straight-up action movie and got artsy.
- The Bourne Legacy may have misfired choosing Renner over Cooper; the Limitless TV show likewise had the same material without Cooper and did not work.
- Abbie Cornish's park chase, where she takes a pill to think her way out of a knife attack, is nominated; the film keeps surprising, as when she slices the bad guy's face with a little girl's ice skate or Eddie drinks the bad guy's blood.
- Asked whether he lived in New York, he says Brooklyn rather than Manhattan and jokes that cabs drive through Central Park every day like in Die Hard with a Vengeance. — Chris Ryan
- Eddie fighting Russian gangsters and drinking NZT blood is nominated; his vocabulary grows through the film, and the suddenly blinded villain who is still a threat is a favorite trope, as in Halloween and Big Trouble in Little China.
- The sterile New York arms-dealer apartment is a real fantasy spot.
- One pick is the Cooper-versus-De Niro ending, with 'I see everything, Carl,' the predicted car accident and his diagnosis of Van Loon's heart; it is also De Niro's best scene.
- Most action movies end badly, as Taken does with its coda; a 'Bill Simmons cut' ending movies when the villain dies is floated, and this film pulls off not needing another scene, with the lunch ordering scene as dessert.
- Another favorite is the come-up after he gets the stash, especially the editor leaving three increasingly excited voicemails about his first pages, which is what a professional writer is after.
- A joke recalls Chris leaving Shea three messages about his eighth-grade football team diary.
- The pick is the montage where he cures Helen's cancer, learns to play piano and starts day trading. — Chris Ryan
