Movie Review: Lucy

Lucy (2014)

Two and half Stars out of Five

R

Lucy: Scarlett Johansson

Professor Norman: Morgan Freeman

Mr. Chang: Min-Sik Choi

Pierre Del Rio: Amr Waked

Director/Writer: Luc Besson

Lucy is a disappointing amalgam of film genre: science fiction, comedy, kung-fu, mobster, revenge, and even philosophical/science. It will come as little surprise that trying to achieve so much, the movie largely fails to deliver on any of the various channels. The movie does not even really provide much in the way of eye candy with respect to the various special effects either. This movie can easily be skipped, but if you really want to know what it is about, read on.

The film begins with a scene from early in the history of the hominids, presumably Lucy herself. She sits in a stream and while looking fearfully about drinks from it. Moving forward in time, we meet a modern Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) being accosted by her disreputable boyfriend outside a swanky Taipei hotel. Against her better wishes, at the behest of her boyfriend she enters the hotel to deliver a package to a Mr. Chang (Mik-Sik Choi). He turns out to be a gangster and drug king pin. Lucy quickly finds herself a drug-mule for Mr. Chang. However, the drug bag sewn into abdomen ruptures, and like every B sci-fi movie from the 50’s, rather than dying from the effects of the drug, she becomes enhanced. Wielding her new, God-like powers she begins a campaign of revenge aimed at Mr. Chang. Along the way, she hooks up with Professor Norman (Morgan Freeman). While she was enjoying Taiwan, he had been lecturing an adoring audience of how little humans used their minds, and if only they could use more, life would be so sweet. Lucy having now proven his thesis wants to explain to him all she now knows. Meanwhile, having disrupted his drug empire, Mr. Chang wants to pay her back. And it is just so hard to predict what will happen in Paris when they all get there: guns, explosions, cars driving the wrong way, and creepy visual effects for the new Miss Lucy.

To its credit, the movie has two fine scenes with Ms. Johansson showing her skills as an actor, and also indicating what this movie might have been had M. Besson stuck to a single movie genre. In the first, as Lucy realizes the danger she is in with Mr. Chang, she acts out just how pitiful a situation she quickly realizes she has fallen into. Johansson displays a believable role as a helpless young woman, one that seems likely to die very soon. Later after having escaped and as she perceives her changing status from that as a young woman into something far different, she makes a tearful call to her mother. Using the opportunity that science fiction offers her in this situation she tells her mom she remembers everything: from being held and nursed by her mother to a lifetime’s thousands of kisses from her mom. It was moving and compassionate, and could only happen in the otherwise unbelievable situation the fantasy elements of this story permit her character to experience.

Luc Besson has made a number of movies that span a variety of genre. He has been perhaps the most commercially successful with his Taken and Transporter franchises: kinetic, fight scene/car chase drivel that make large amounts of money and have little to say beyond the idea of righteous revenge. Due to his earlier movies such as Subway, The Big Blue, or even Nikita, he has been classed as a member of the “Cinema du Look”, a film school that favors style over substance. One could easily perceive such influences within Lucy.  During the opening scenes of Lucy being cornered by her boyfriend and then by Mr. Chang, wildlife scenes of a gazelle being hunted by a cheetah are intercut with the human scenes of her deteriorating situation with Mr. Chang. Is this a stylistic touch or an attempt at humor; it seems more the latter to me than the former. And that is the fundamental problem with the movie. Besson’s intent with the movie is so watered down by the various genre shifts and/or stylistic flourishes; the movie just degenerates to the level of the pointless car chase that occurs near the end of the movie. What does the car chase mean; oh yeah, just like the movie: nothing.

Had Besson really wanted to explore what it is that makes Man the creature he is; to explore the limits and opportunities of the mind, he had the framework of a movie that could have made a film worth experiencing. The concept of how much of the human mind is actually used and what might happen to the human that had her mind expanded, what happens to her humanness is a subject worth exploring. But explore it sans gangsters with machine guns, TOW anti-tank weapons and pseudo-science lectures. Lucy is not that movie and should be skipped by anyone not solely interested in car chases that end with police cars flying through the air.