Lucy (2014): Written and
directed by Luc Bessen. Starring: Scarlett Johansson, Morgan
Freeman, Amr Waked, Choi Min-sik. Running Time: 89 minutes.
Rating: 3/4
I suspect a great many people who
saw Lucy (and the same may also apply
to those who are planning to see it in the future) were expecting it to be
nothing more than a high-octane action thriller starring Scarlett Johansson as
a Black Widow mockup, using the debunked “we only use 10% of our brains” urban
legend as a passing justification for Lucy being able to take down bad guys
with increasingly Jedi-esque psychic powers.
I know I certainly was, at least to some extent. To my pleasant surprise, that was not the
case. While it is far from perfect, and
could perhaps have done more with what is actually a pretty decent sci-fi
set-up, Lucy is a fun and interesting
visual ride, and is definitely worth taking the time to see.
The film does indeed start as a
straight-up crime thriller- Lucy is an American study-abroad student (you can’t
pretend to be this young forever, Scarlett dear) in Taiwan, who
gets tricked by a friend into becoming the unwilling carrier of a package of
neurotoxic drugs inserted into her belly.
The series of scenes setting this up produced the most squeamishness I’ve
felt in a movie theater thus far this year.
The violence is brutally unflinching, and Scarlett perfectly captures
the look of a terrified bird trapped in a cage.
The sci-fi aspect soon kicks in, though, when one of the thuggish guards
beats Lucy so violently (apparently unaware of what she’s carrying inside of
her) that the bag with the drugs splits, causing the toxin to spill undiluted
into her bloodstream. It is right around
now that we learn, via a series of cutaways to a lecture being given by Morgan
Freeman (because really, who else?), that this drug contains chemical
properties that can jolt the human brain into unlocking more and more of its “potential.” And by potential, I mean basically the
ability to do anything and everything required by the plot.
These scenes, especially at the
beginning, also feature a great many shots of stock National Geographic footage
centering on wildlife spliced in between the bits of dialogue, obviously meant
to enhance/add symbolism to whatever happens to be going on in the narrative at
that particular time. While the clips
brought in are brutally lacking in subtlety, it’s an interesting effort on the
director’s part, something you usually only see in pure arthouse fair, and I
appreciated the visual variety it brings to keep things interesting to
watch.
When she realizes what is happening,
Lucy has a surgeon remove the remaining drugs from her system and contacts
Morgan Freeman, hatching a plan to obtain from the other carriers the rest of
the drugs so that Freeman can make a formula with them that will boost her
brainvolution into overdrive, so that she can amass as much information on the
nature of reality as possible and pass it along before…..well, it’s not
entirely clear what will happen, at least at first. First, though, before any of that begins, she
calls her mother. Realizing that the
process she is undergoing is likely to be irreversible, and suddenly hyper
aware of the true miracle of what mothers do for their children, she calls her
mother from the hospital, and thanks her in detail for what she did for her
growing up. It all centers around a line
that, had Scarlett been any less sincere in her performance, would have reached
new heights of oddball corniness. Here,
though it’s properly affecting. It’s
always good to see a movie selling itself on the action take a slow moment here
and there to let us connect things together.
Although, as previously admitted, I
wish the movie had played around a bit more with the concepts it introduces as
plot points, and even the story does stretch itself thin by the end, I can’t
find all too many reasons to complain.
There is a nice visual style being brought to play here, culminating in
a journey Lucy takes through time and space, including an encounter with her
unspoken namesake, the proto-human female whose skeleton is now also known as “Lucy.” In a shot reminiscent of the Sistine Chapel,
Lucy reaches out to touch proto-Lucy’s finger with hers. Is the movie implying that present-day Lucy
herself becomes our God, or rather that even in a hyper-advanced mental state,
she is still susceptible to the cultural sensitivities of her upbringing,
unable to resist indulging in a moment latent with obvious symbolism?
I was never blown away by the movie,
but it did give me some interesting ideas to chew over, and as the credits
rolled I couldn’t help but think that it was a pity that most of the people I
saw it with would probably feel no urge to think about the film on a level any
deeper than, “Huh. Shit was cray-cray.” But I digress. If I spent more than a few passing moments
worrying about the lack of intellectual curiosity amongst the general
movie-going public, I would never again wish to see the light of day. To return, then, to the topic of this
review. Lucy is definitely not the best
of this year’s summer fare, and it in no way touches the intellectual heft of Scarlett’s
other major non-blockbuster feature of the year Under The Skin, which we’ll get to soon, but there is an
intelligence in its story and enough commitment to the execution to make the
trip worth the time and effort.
-Noah
Franc
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