While the 10% brain power myth is a cool one,
as displayed quite capably in the wonderfully stupid movie
'Limitless' a few years back, it is still nonetheless a
myth. But director Luc Besson is no fool. Need to
sell something that is patently false as fact, which is the
entirety of the plot of his sci-fi-ish action film
'Lucy'? Then prop Morgan Freeman up in front of an
audience of super concerned onlookers and allow his smooth,
comforting voice to explain in explicit detail how this
falsity is God's honest truth. I'm sold. As a
result, I'm pretty much sold on 'Lucy', just as I was sold on
'Limitless', which is also wonderfully stupid.
Lucy (Scarlet Johansson) is a fun loving college student in
Taiwan (?) who after a night of partying with her new
boyfriend Richard (Pilou Sabaek) just wants to go home and get
some rest. Not happening. Richard tricks Lucy into
delivering a mysterious silver case to the very dangerous Mr.
Jang (Min Sik Choi), and while it looked for a moment that
this was about to get Lucy killed, like we've seen quite a
number of people get killed up to this point, but Mr. Jang has
other plans for Lucy. Simply, Mr. Jang wants Lucy and a
few other involuntary volunteers to be drug mules for this
crazy experimental new narcotic that the kids are just gonna
love when it hits the street.
Simple enough I guess, put these drugs in the tummies of these
mules and send them on their merry way. Unless some
crazed psycho starts kicking people in their surgically
repaired tummies, rupturing the drug bag and sending this drug
coursing through the system of this mule. What
probably should've happened is that Lucy dies, but what ends
up happening is that this drug has started unlocking precious
percentage points in Lucy's brain, and now Lucy can see and do
things that normal people simply cannot do. Now I
might've been a little confused about what is happening to
Lucy at the moment, but fortunately the wise Professor Norman
(Freeman) is off to the side systematically breaking down the
theories of what the human brain could be able to do if it
were able to access 20, 30, 40 or 50% of its brain
power. 100%? Even Professor Norman doesn't know
that. He's going to find out though.
So Lucy has access to googobs of brain power,
she can control her metabolism, she can think out the box like
nobody ever has, she can control other people and she can even
see Mother Gaia and all that is connected to her. She
also has a bunch of crazed Koreans on her tail who really want
their drugs back. Lucy on the other hand just wants…
hell, I don't know what Lucy wants. Like any rational
person, she asked Morgan Freeman what she should do, because
he is all knowing and stuff, but even he doesn't know what she
should do. Whatever Lucy and her super brain does decide
on, because time is running out on her, a rocket launcher will
somehow be involved. I know, right?
So while 'Lucy' might not be the most original movie in
concept, nods to other films we mentioned like 'Limitless',
with a touch of Matrix here and a dash of '2001' there, at
least writer / director Luc Besson has made a film that is
original in the sense that at least it's not a sequel, remake,
or adaptation. Of course this is a EuropaCorp film which
Besson pretty much owns, so if this is what it takes to make a
semi-original film, then that's what it takes. But we
are thankful for at least that.
We are also thankful for a movie that entertains greatly, a
movie that pretends to be smart, but really knows that it is
not, and we are thankful for a movie that puts great actors in
very familiar roles so that they don't really have to
act. Sure, Morgan Freeman's character has the name of
Professor Norman, but is Professor Norman really all that
different from the patriarchal, comforting, upper executive
roles that Mr. Freeman has taken over the last decade or
so? I think not. And if you've spent any amount of
time watching Korean Cinema, then you already know Min-Sik
Choi can sleepwalk his way through playing a rotten character
and still do it better than 98% of all actors working
today. That's comforting for me. For the
first half hour Scarlett Johansson gave a fine performance as
the perplexed Lucy, then she was pretty much directed to be
robotic the rest of the way. It worked though.
Another good thing is that while Lucy was accessing most of
her brain power, we really needed only a fraction of our own
fraction to get with this film. What little in the movie
that might have been intellectually challenging, Morgan
Freeman already has explained to us, and Lucy's great brain
power didn't stop her from shooting people in the face,
driving cars real fast while causing mass destruction in the
process, and wearing really tight skirts. Lucy might be
super smart, but she still knows she's super hot. Then
there was the end that went someplace I'm still not quite sure
of. Lucy tells us something like, 'you have the power of
your brain, and now you know what to do with it'. Sorry
Lucy, I still don't know. And lastly… USB Lucy?
Really? Where's the redundancy? That's not all
that smart.
At the end of it all, 'Lucy' is a fun movie crafted by a
director who knows how to have fun making a movie. Maybe
not as bright as it would like us to think it is, but still
fun to sit through.
