Lucy Review

 Lucy is about what would happen if you could access more than 10% of your brain. It starts with Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) in Taiwan. She’s forced by her boyfriend (apparently disguised as Bono) to deliver a briefcase to gangster Mr Jang (Min-sik Choi). It’s filled with drugs, she doesn’t know. When she meets Jang, he kidnaps her and puts the drugs, sealed, in her stomach; she has to smuggle them to America or he’ll kill her family.

This is cut with Morgan Freeman’s Professor Samuel Norman (which doesn’t sound like a real name), giving a lecture about his research into the human brain; how humans only use 10% and what would happen if we could access more. It’s also cut with footage of predators in nature, a cheetah chasing a gazelle, which is like, a metaphor, or something.

So the drugs get loose and enter her system, and as the drugs keep affecting her, she’s able to access more and more of her brain and you see captions of 20%, 40% and so on throughout the film as she becomes more powerful, firstly being really smart, then moving things with her mind and some whole new levels of ridiculousness later on. The premise bothers people; it’s a fallacy that people use only 10% of their brain, and the film goes on about it, firstly with the slightly cringey Morgan Freeman lecture, then constantly referencing the scientific; Lucy bangs on about 'quantum physics, applied mathematics, the infinite capacity of the cell's nucleus’. Being a Sci-fi film it’s okay to show the unbelievable, but to try and ground it in reality just by using sciencey words can be really grating. It’s the least of the film’s problems, though.

It all goes wrong when she assimilates the drugs, in a scene reminiscent of Inception, gravity seems to disappear (why?) and she’s writhing around on the ceiling and walls. Then she’s calm. For the entirety of the movie. Her newfound gift seems to come with a price as they so often do; she now has no personality. Dead eyed and monotonous, it’s like she’s trying to out-zen Neo, at one point even saying ‘I don’t feel pain, fear, desire’ which might be nice for her, but really, really dull to watch. It’s not ScarJo’s fault, and while it’s interesting to have a main character who isn’t burdened with human emotions, emotions are kind of necessary if you want an audience to engage with the main character.

  This emotionlessness also sucks the fun out of superpowers. The first thing Eddie Mora does with his new abilities in Limitless (which has a very similar concept) is sleep with his Landlord’s wife. He gets in fights, has affairs, makes millions on the stock market, and has fun before the dangerous realities of the drug become apparent. Because Lucy doesn’t care, she has no fun. But it’s not that kind of movie. She just wants to meet up with Morgan Freeman (not sure why).

If you did care about her however, she has a pretty easy ride anyway. At one point she’s speeding through Parisian traffic, but she can move cars out of the way with her mind. She’s pursued by Mr Jang throughout the film, but he has guns and she has god-like superpowers. There’s a bit in Nick Hornby’s book High Fidelity that sums it up perfectly. The characters are listing top five Gerry Anderson shows, and the protagonist says ‘I don’t believe you’ve got Captain Scarlett at number one, Dick. The guy was immortal! What’s fun about that?’.

There are a few things to enjoy, mostly Julian Rhind-Tutt’s performance as ‘The Limey’ (ugh). He explains the fates of those who were kidnapped, that they would be used as drug mules or they and their families would be murdered. Adding heaped teaspoons of English politeness to an intimidating monologue, he’s absolutely terrifying and the best part of the movie, but he’s only in it for about five minutes.

Lucy can’t quite make up its mind, with the direction and pacing of an action thriller without any of the thrills, it uses a lot of big words and explicitly talks about big ideas to try to sound clever, and it really feels like it’s trying, but it tries to have its cake and eat it with (boring) car chases and shoot outs. The ridiculousness of the whole thing does stop it from being boring though, and it’s unintentionally funny; my friend and I were laughing throughout, and at least it tries to do something different.