Cooper's Apex is American Sniper, which he funded and which is his action Apex; it is not this movie.
Relativity Media is raised: they gamed the system, turning a $40 million movie into $170 million and proving their formula.
Abbie Cornish gets a yes; she seemed to be having a moment, also with Ryan Philippe, before Brie Larson, in a garbled line, corrected her out of it.
Little-kid ice-skate attacks are definitely a peak: choosing the eight-year-old's skate over gardening shears or a baseball bat is crazy.
For skating-rink attempted murders The Good Son is chosen over this; a riff imagines the dad explaining the afternoon to his wife.
Fake Russian accents are up there but not the top; Malcovich (as transcribed) in Rounders is in the conversation, preferred over Connery's 'one ping only' for quotable lines. — Chris Ryan
Subway fights get a no: not even a podium finisher behind The Warriors, Fast and Furious 6 and Neo versus Agent Smith in The Matrix.
Drugs that give all-being powers are floated as an Apex candidate without a stated answer.
The guy version of the Pretty Woman glow-up montage, from extra-looking to perfectly fitted suit with sit-ups and great skin, is raised as a candidate without a stated answer. — Chris Ryan
Composer Paul Leonard Morgan's score is called his Apex: it sounds like what becoming smart would sound like inside your head.
Another pick is Gennedy, as transcribed, played by Andrew Howard, with uncertainty over how to pronounce the name.
The Gennady pick is liked for when the drug kicks in for him: nicer clothes, a slightly better vocabulary, more of a thinker who wants an import-export business.
De Niro is the pick: after Jackie Brown and Meet the Parents he made paycheck movies, doesn't seem fully into this one and scales it back like Gene Hackman's autopilot in The Replacements, though it works.
A disagreement: not a top-20 De Niro performance, but he brings gravity to Carl Van Loon, is better than Paul Giamatti would be, and has an affinity with Cooper while letting him chew the scenery.
De Niro could have met Cooper's final threat with a stare and a Heat-style reply; De Niro scales back on autopilot while Pacino gets big.
The biggest aged-worst item is the rating: this should have been rated R, with more violence and sex.
PG-13 is liked as is, because kids walking through the room are no problem and adults still get the drug and sex material. — Shea Serrano
PG-13 suits the TNT, USA and Paramount cable universe with few edits; the TV series was canceled after one season.
Eddie's smart-sounding speeches are rough on inspection: the Portugal salt-cod and Brits lines captivate an audience of nine people, and he sounds like he could have run Germany better than Hitler.
The basketball version of Eddie sounding smart would be saying threes are worth more than twos, or the Process's bottom-out logic.
Abbie Cornish runs pumping her fists; a track coach should have been hired for that scene.
There is not much aged-worst; the disappointing TV show is the one item, despite excitement that Cooper pops up in it. — Shea Serrano
An R version is wanted to see Cooper break an arm; older movies like Jaws are cited as more leniently rated, countered that a shark is a naturally occurring phenomenon, unlike Total Recall's violence.
CBS should have made the show with an older lead, a 62-year-old CEO taking the drug.
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
