Starring: Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman, Min-sik Choi, Amr Waked, Analeigh Tipton
Directed By: Luc Besson
Lucy is one of those frustrating movies that you both love and hate. It’s a movie that could have been so much better, without being terrible. There’s a really cool plot here, and a decent concept, that just isn’t quite executed the right way.
Luc Besson spends a lot of time cutting away to different things, like watching animals be born, or watching cheetahs take down a gazelle, to use them as literal metaphors for what is happening in Lucy’s life at the current time. Oh, Lucy also happens to be the name of the oldest known human… who we also get to see a few times in the movie, creating fire and drinking water from a stream. Oh… and there’s dinosaurs.
That whole paragraph highlights everything silly about Lucy. The strong plot is that Lucy has been given an experimental drug that causes her to start accessing the rest of her brain. Morgan Freeman believes that we only use 10%. What happens when we start using more?
Lucy happens.
As with all Luc Besson films, the action scenes are expertly directed. He’s a master of making action movies look cool. Johansson does the rest, showing us that Lucy is a normal young girl who just wants to be a college girl and party. Unfortunately, her boyfriend is a loser, and gets her caught up in a very dangerous drug smuggling ring. Things go awry, and Johansson develops superpowers. Very cool looking super powers.
I loved sections of this film, and I hated sections of this film. I hated that Johansson randomly kisses a guy to get him to follow her. The guy would have followed her without the kiss. There was no need for that.
I won’t even begin to get into the science of Lucy, because I’d imagine it’s all very silly. I’m sure there’s someone at Harvard pulling their hair out after hearing some of the stuff said in this film. I doubt Besson consulted actual scientists. He probably just made everything up. Which is OK, because that’s entertainment, and that’s the agreement we made when I came to see this work of fiction. I don’t need it to all be true. It’s not a biography or a documentary. I like my science fiction rooted firmly in fiction.
My problem is the cutaways are completely unnecessary. I don’t need you to literally translate what’s happening on screen by showing me a cheetah pouncing on a gazelle. I can figure out for myself what is going on.
I have a feeling that Lucy will be a love-it-or-hate-it film, and I can’t wait to read the conversations about it. It’s not a film for everyone, but it is a film for Scarlett Johansson fans. I thought she showed a lot of star quality in this film, and hopefully Lucy will help launch her into a true A-List status.
FINAL GRADE: B-
