Lucy - Review

DIRECTOR: Luc Besson
WRITER: Luc Besson
STARRING: Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman, Amr Waked, Choi Min-sik

Pretension is a word that gets thrown around a lot when it comes to movies. More often than not it just feels like a cheap, easy way to dismiss films that are ambitious and tackle really big ideas. Depending on their budget they may also have lots and lots of neat special effects to show the audience all the computer generated wonders of the universe. Personally I've never really been a fan of the word, mostly because pretension is usually such a vague and subjective measure. In this case, though, I can't think of a better word to describe Lucy, a movie that tries so hard to be "about" something but fails miserably at doing it, other than pretentious. Want to stop and develop our characters? *pfft* No time for that! Instead lets inter-cut some footage of animals, because get it, humans are animals. Symbolism, right? Oh no, we've run out of animal stock footage twenty minutes in, now what do we do!? Quick, lets throw some more special effects and mediocre gunfights at the audience, maybe they won't notice!

The film wastes little time getting to its story. Lucy is an American studying in Taipei who gets tricked into doing a delivery for her shady boyfriend (who she's only been with for one week). This ends up involving her with a violent gang of Taiwanese mobsters (who speak Korean for some reason) who force her to participate in a drug mule scheme for the new synthetic drug she just delivered. When her captors accidentally rupture the bag of drugs stored inside of her, instead of killing her via overdose it ends up giving her super-powers via unlocking the untapped potential of her brain. After that its a race against time to deliver the knowledge in her brain to Morgan Freeman because...reasons I guess.

Speaking of Morgan Freeman, his character (who I can't even remember the name of) seems to exist only for two reasons: to deliver exposition and to be amazed at stuff. That seems to be a running theme with Morgan Freeman's characters in recent years, like the studios are just renting his voice to spice up their exposition whether he's actually good for the role or not. Don't get me wrong, tries his darnedest to make what he says sound remotely convincing, but not even his silky smooth voice can make this movies script sound anything less than ridiculous. What he says doesn't mean anything anyways. Everything he has to say is already known by Lucy by the point she even knows he exists. Every opportunity we have to discover for ourselves what's happening to Lucy is undermined by these really awkward cutaways to Dr. Freeman's lecture to a bunch of scientist folk (or us, depending on how you view it) where he basically tells us exactly what's going on at any given time. It ruins any kind of natural suspense the movie could have had. It doesn't help that the movie basically calls out explicitly that he's pulling pretty much everything he says out of his ass.

By around the 30 minute mark, it becomes pretty clear that our protagonist is pretty much indestructible, so whatever tension there might have been goes straight out the window. You'd think Scarlett Johansson literally becoming God for an hour would be more entertaining, but after the first few tricks it's clear all she's going to do are a few tricks like flinging people around  and typing really really fast, maybe give the vfx guys an excuse to splash a few special effects at the screen. Considering all the power she supposedly has, you'd think some of the action sequences might be a bit more...creative. Instead, we mostly just get some mediocre, stake-less gun fights and car chases. The movie has such a (thankfully) short runtime that I spent most of it checking off neat moments from the trailer, and yes all the cool stuff was in the trailer. Mind you, that's not a knock on the trailer, its just that there's just so little good stuff that there really wasn't much they could advertise.

Bottom line is that because there's no threat of harm, there's very little reason for the audience to be interested in what happens. It's a similar to the problem the Matrix sequels had: how do you make a character that's far more powerful than any other character interesting when nothing can really hurt them. There are only a few ways I can think of to go about it. The story can either:

a) Make their opponent(s) powerful enough to match them - the old shonen route.

No such luck here. Our Korean speaking Taiwanese gangsters are little more than a nuisance to our heroine, though they do randomly kill people every now and again just to let you know that they're still the bad guys.

b) Have an interesting supporting cast that we can invest our interest in.

Nope.

or c) Make our heroes stakes something that isn't necessarily tied to external conflict

Now the third one here is where Lucy at least makes an attempt at deriving conflict, though to call it an attempt might be a bit generous. Because Lucy is rapidly becoming more and more powerful, and her knowledge more and more vast, she feels she is losing the parts of herself that make her human. Her out of the blue romance with a french policeman is justified in that she's looking for a reminder of her humanity or something. I guess knowing a guy for a couple hours is enough time for nigh-omnipotent beings to fall in love or something. Other than catching the other drug mules, the french policeman (whose name I didn't forget, they just didn't give him one) is a completely pointless character who, like Dr. Freeman, does nothing but cue the audience on when they should be amazed at all the neat shit Lucy does.

In one of the film's better scenes, Lucy breaks into an hospital and nonchalantly kills one of the patients (after all, she says, she knows he's going to die anyways). This is so that the doctor operating on the guy can cut her open and remove the bag of drugs from inside of her. While this is going on, she borrows someones cellphone and calls her mom seemingly out of the blue (all of this while the doctor cuts her open). Through her tears she tells her about how she can remember things from her life she shouldn't even be able to remember, and feel things she's never felt before. This goes on for a while, and eventually she ends the call by telling her mother that she's going to die and she loves her very much. Now initially I thought when she said she was dying that she literally meant that she was dying (which she was...I think) but thinking back there might be another layer to it. As she gains more and more use of her "brain's capacity" her capacity for human empathy slowly disappears. She's losing what makes her her, so in that way she does kind of die. After that scene Lucy pretty much becomes an emotionless blank slate for the rest of the film. It could have been really chilling if the reaction from her mom hadn't been so hilariously clueless.

As it is, Lucy seems content more so with just seeming smart rather than actually being smart. Moments like the hospital scene show the kind potential this concept has, but Besson seems content to squander all that on portentous tracts on "human potential" and pseudo-scientific techno-babble.  Any chance for intelligent subtext is replaced with a surface layer lecture and fake science, brokering no ambiguity and leaving the audience with little to think about once they leave the theater. In fact, I'm not even entirely convinced this isn't some sort of elaborate parody of "pretentious" movies. Its great that movies like this and Maleficent have female protagonists are doing well, but when are writers going to realize that a powerful character doesn't equal a strong character.

So what did you all think? Leave a comment below with your thoughts.