Jun 272014
 
three reels

Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) is forced to become a drug mule for a new synthetic narcotic with unknown properties. When the plastic bag inside her ruptures, the massive dose of the drug initiates changes in her, allowing her to access more and more of her brain’s capacity. As her powers grow, and her death from the overdose imminent, she chases after the remaining three packages of the drug as well as seeks out Professor Stanley Norman (Morgan Freeman), a theoretician contemplating the consequences of using higher percentages of the brain.

OK, I’ve got to start with this: The basic premise of this film is a lie. I don’t mind science fiction films messing with or ignoring real science. Sound in space? Fine. Gravity on spaceships? Fine. But Lucy propagates a fallacy that most people believe and that is a problem. The lie is that humans use only 10% of the brain. No. That’s not how brains work. We use 100%. And yeah, there was no way I could let that go while watching.

So there’s that. But let’s start again.

Lucy is a rapid fire action picture that pulls you along and doesn’t let you take a breath. That’s good because if you got a chance to think, you’d see it doesn’t make much sense. The engine of the film—her conflict with the drug-dealing Korean mob—ceases to be a conflict before the halfway mark. If she’d spend a few minutes to stop them, they’d be stopped. There is absolutely nothing they could do. But thinking is not something Lucy allows you to do. I can’t recall a faster paced film. We’re in a race car in the middle of a pack and it isn’t stopping. I give Lucy high marks for editing as we whip along so quickly yet nothing seems to be missing.

Director Luc Besson knows how to make clever, fast-paced films. He’s never been terribly original, but he can take well-worn ideas and mix them around with a pulp sensibility to produce something that seems new—for example, The Fifth Element. With Lucy he takes a bit from 2001: A Space Odyssey and so much from Altered States, that it is approaching a remake. He does a bit less with the material than either of those do, but then neither of them had a miniskirted girl blowing away armed henchmen. And that points to the rest of his dept—not counting Michelangelo’s The Creation—being to himself; the first third of Lucy owes much to Besson’s La Femme Nikita (1990) and Leon: The Professional (1994). Yes, before we get cosmic, there’s a lot of shooting.

Scarlett Johansson is an interesting actress whose performances don’t always work. She never seems quite real, which stands out even more in period pieces. But when she can mix an otherworldliness with sexuality, she is unbeatable. I can’t think of anyone else who could have pulled off becoming a goddess nearly so well.