Lucy (**½)
Directed by: Luc Besson
Starring: Scarlet Johansson, Morgan
Freeman, Min-Sik Choi, Amr Waked, Julian Rhind-Tutt, Pilou Asbæk, Analeigh
Tipton
Seen: August 31st 2014
**½ Out of ****
Lucy is a speculative science fiction movie
from Luc Besson, a director best known for movies he directed up to 20 years
ago (1997’s The Fifth Element, and 1994’s Leon: The Professional). Lucy is,
while entertaining, a clear indicator of how far Besson has fallen in the last
20 years. It speculates on the capability a human may have if given the ability
to fully utilise 100% of cerebral capacity, and not the estimated 10% that we
do use. There have been previous attempts at this kind of idea, most recently
with Limitless starring Bradley Cooper. Lucy however takes a different
viewpoint; where Cooper’s Eddie Morra was selfish and went after personal gain,
Lucy is selfless, her only personal consideration being survival, with everything
else geared towards assisting science – through overwhelming and endless action
and violence, that is.
The movie starts with Lucy (Johansson)
and her scummy boyfriend Richard (Asbæk) chatting on a street in Taipei.
Richard tricks Lucy into delivering a package to some men of questionable intent
led by a Mr. Jang (Choi), but he pays the ultimate price for his duplicitous
actions, as he is killed just as Lucy is taken. Upstairs, Lucy is introduced to
Mr. Jang, covered in blood – Lucy glimpses his “subjects” in pools of blood as
she is bullied across the room. The suitcase, chained to her wrist, contains the
new drug CPH4, and Mr. Jang and his associates are looking for mules to
transport it to the USA, Germany, France, and Italy. Lucy is the mule to
America, and she wakes up with a bag of the drugs having been implanted in her
stomach. She passes out again and when she comes to she is in a holding cell
with tattooed men leering over her. When she defends herself from their
advances, they beat her up, causing a tear in the bag and a release of a large
dose of the drug into her system.
Instead of killing her, the drug goes
to work on her brain, drastically increasing her cerebral capability. She
quickly becomes a force to be reckoned with, and after going to hospital to
have the bag removed, Lucy goes home to do some research regarding her current
condition. She contacts Professor Samuel Norman (Freeman), who’s research in
the field she believes to be a key to her survival, and arranges to meet up
with him in Paris. She also arranges for the capture of the other mules with Pierre
Del Rio (Waked), a police Captain in Paris. She gets more and more ‘powers’ as the
movie continues to remind us that Lucy’s brain usage capability is increasing,
fast headed towards 100%, and no one knows what will happen when it gets there.
The movie is visually arresting with relatively
smart action sequences, interesting mental travels for Lucy, and very odd cut-away
scenes paralleling Lucy’s situation. The last 10 minutes becomes ridiculous, as
the story progresses in leaps and bounds towards a pretty anticlimactic ending.
I find it interesting that, both in Limitless and Lucy, the “higher level” of
consciousness brings about a human that is not all that human anymore, but
rather more of a computer or a soldier or a super-businessman. The movies both
speculate that with more cerebral capability, we will become less human, rather
than more so. Lucy assumes evolution as fact, and it incorporates the supposed
oldest ancestor of mankind, also Lucy – a badly animated primate – into events,
going so far as to reference Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam, with Lucy as
God.
I believe Lucy could have been so much
more of a movie if the makers had gone for less. Lucy loses all its credibility
in its own overblown evolutionary ambition, and becomes absolutely ridiculous
where it was aiming to bring evolution into the picture as a grand idea.
Comments