Limitless/YMMV

• Ass Pull: At the end of the movie Eddie got off the drugs offscreen, but retained all the capabilities. Why? Because he came up with Phlebotinum offscreen.
  • It's possible that he hasn't retained all of his capabilities, but has managed to hold on to some of them while turning his life around unmedicated. It's also possible that he actually *was* still on NZT, and that final dialogue was really just a huge gamble to buy him time and get Van Loon off his back.
  • The alternate ending of the movie is far more ambiguous in regards to whether he's telling Van Loon the truth.
  • He actually states that he realized the weaknesses of NZT, so he just made it so the effects became permanent.
• Broken Aesop: "Drugs are bad for you, but you'll never be successful without them, so you should take a bunch and earn a shitload of money while high so you can pay a bunch of private pharmacists to reverse-engineer the drugs in a way that lets you gradually wean yourself off of them while still permanently keeping their positive effects."
  • Fridge Brilliance: There are plenty of legal drugs on the market used for activities such as studying.
• Crowning Moment of Awesome: Eddie vs. the Russian Mafia thugs.

intelligence feats is discovering "this thing called Google."

• Escapist Character: Eddie is a failure, up until a wonder drug gives him Super Intelligence. Though he's a very intelligent failure, after all he did get Abbie Cornish.
• Fridge Brilliance: The film uses some common scientific myths, such as Vernon's statment of 90% of Your Brain and when Eddie mentions his Improbably High IQ of four digits. Vernon is a drug dealer with no scientific credentials at all, and was simply explaining things in a simple, if inaccurate, manner. Eddie never took any IQ tests, and just pulled some random number out of his ass.
  • The movie discuss his own plot when Eddie talks with others about the Portuguese Empire: The story of mankind could be resumed in: Some guys that nobody noticed earlier discover a new technique and take over the world.Some centuries later, they lost everything and become just another anonymous country.
  • Why there is not any local or federal investigation following the numerous deaths caused by NZT? Because all the users got Acquired Situational Narcissism that alienated his true loved ones to be In with the In Crowd, leaving them Lonely at the Top: To initiate an investigation, you must be missed by someone. When the NZT user dies, he’s Dying Alone: literally nobody cares.
• Fridge Logic: Why didn't the police search Eddie at the murder scene? If he was a prime suspect, which he would be having found the body, they would have cuffed and searched him before taking him to the police department to make a statement and therefore found the NZT pills he shoved into the small of his back.
  • Eddie described his ex-wife Melissa as the smartest woman he knew who dumped him immediately. High intelligence and impulsive behavior. Those sound like indications that she was already on NZT when he met her.
• Squick: Not just the aforementioned Eye Scream but what comes shortly before that, to which everyone in the audience went "Oh, EWWW!"
• Moral Event Horizon: Another secondary effect of NZT is to let the user ignore the Moral Event Horizon:
  • When Lindy takes NZT to escape from an assassin, she uses a little girl as an Improvised Weapon. When she is free of the effects, she doesn’t want anything to do with NZT or Eddie.
  • Any other user hooked on NZT is willingly enough to torture or kill for another dosis.
• What an Idiot!: Eddie's new and improved life is interrupted when he finds all his NZT-48 is gone. For the month he's been taking those limited supply of drugs (including double doses), did Eddie not think to ration them properly? That's a mistake that anyone, with or without heightened intelligence, wouldn't overlook.
  • "Feelings of invincibility", remember?
  • It was stolen. He didn't run out. If you're thinking of the scene when he calls in sick before the big meeting, he deliberately didn't take more because he thought he killed that woman while under NZT's influence.
    • He didn't find out about the dead girl until after we went to the meeting "sober". He didn't take them because he didn't like that he kept missing time.
• Too Dumb to Live: The Russian, for hiring a bodyguard who is blind in one eye. Which Eddie of course takes advantage of in the final scene.
  • And as a reminder, the Russian is also on NZT.
  • Eddie could have avoided a lot of problems by paying back the Russian as soon as he could. Which was like 48 hours later.
• Why Would Anyone Take Him Back?
  • Well, he does remember everything she likes and dislikes about him and can probably convincingly present himself as having "reformed" to be exactly the guy she wants him to be.
• Writers Cannot Do Math: Eddie was quadrupling his money every day. He started off with 800 dollars the first day, got 2 grand the second and had 7.5 grand the third. He said that this was going "too slow" so he went to borrow $100,000 from a loan shark the next day. However, if he just kept doing what he was doing, he would have quadrupled his 7.5k and gotten 30k the next day and then 120k the day after that. He saved himself one day by taking out that loan. If he kept his head down the whole time and played the stocks by himself, he would have earned 120 million dollars in a week from the day he decided he needed to take out a loan, without actually needing to take the loan out. Apparently no one on the writing staff understands exponential growth.
  • I think the point was he couldn't keep that exponential growth going for very long. It's easy to turn 2 grand into 7.5, just only need to make another 5.5, but to turn 30k into 120k, that's a bit harder.