Like most Luc Besson movies, Lucy is violent, pretentious
and stupid. However, like the best of his films, it is also imaginative and
thrilling. I was insulted by its bad taste and moronic foundation, but I won’t
deny that it often triggered the section of my brain, which entertains guilty
pleasures.
The story centers on a mid-twenties American student named
Lucy, played by Scarlett Johansson. She is studying abroad in Taiwan and
unfortunate circumstances lead her to be forced against her will into a
drug-smuggling operation for a new dangerous synthetic substance. The drug
packages are concealed through surgical implantation but Lucy’s package is
punctured. The drug leaks into her system revealing its effects to be of such a
dramatic enhancement of the mind and nervous system, that she becomes a super-being.
So, why did Lucy’s unexpected accident create the first
super human, when it could have happened to any test subject in the lab where
it was invented? This is a pretty basic curiosity but the movie doesn’t seem interested
in addressing it.
Sadly, it doesn’t take long for Lucy to become
laugh-worthy as its science-fiction plot is aided by none-other than the go-to story
exposition man himself, Morgan Freeman, who is seen delivering a lecture on the
human brain -filled with the most hilarious pseudo-science one could imagine.
I’m almost tempted to praise this film for being a return to
form for an artist who hasn’t directed a fun movie since his amazing, The Fifth Element. While responsible for writing and producing a few successful
action films, including The Transporter and Taken, Besson only sits in the
director’s chair occasionally. Until Lucy, I felt as though he’d lost touch
with a signature tone, which made his earlier films like La Femme Nikita and Léon: The Professional so beautiful. After watching his embarrassingly
unfunny dark comedy, The Family, last year, I felt like he was washed-up.
The film’s strength is undeniably at its beginning, which
contains contains everything I’ve missed about his work. A beautiful young
woman is at the mercy of powerful men who are unprepared for the monster they
will unleash. Johansson’s work is in the tradition of Anne Parillaud, Natalie Portman and Milla Jovovich -all females who brought emotional weight to
Besson’s films. The film’s mobster villain, played by Min Sik Choi (star of the
original Oldboy) brings an intimidating level of sadism through his screen
presence alone.
Eric Serra’s score of ambient orchestral and electronic
sounds seduces us into the film’s dark trippy fantasy. Thierry Arbogast’s
cinematography follows the action and stages the effects delicately while
capturing his signature symmetrical shots.
I am congratulating Besson and his collaborators for
achieving a style, which has been long-desired on my part. It is the film’s
substance that puts the whole project to shame. The movie has some very cool
sequences, but the further it moves along, the more its ideas seem like
half-baked rip-offs from other films.
As it got close to the end, I started to hypothesize that
Besson’s script was achieved by watching Limitless, Altered States, Crank, The Tree of Life, The Matrix, Scanners, Akira and the very
recent but too-similar Transcendence. After this eighteen-hour movie binge,
he fell asleep, had a Scarlett Johansson wet dream and started writing Lucy when he awoke.
This movie proposes through a vague understanding, that the
average human being uses only ten-percent of their brain’s capacity. I think it
takes even less brain power to know that Lucy is ridiculous.
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