Lucy

In The Sky With Diamonds

I watched an interesting film recently.  A lovable loser stumbles upon a mystery drug that manages to unlock their brain's full potential.  They are able to learn new languages, skills and become more powerful than they ever have before.  Whilst the film has its problems with nonsensical plot-lines and unnecessary characters, the film is balanced with effective performances from the cast, an amazing soundtrack and an overall interesting idea, which probes certain aspects of science-fiction but doesn't lose it's way. Yes, Limitless was a fantastic film.

Luc Besson must have thought the same thing, as he has basically taken that premise, replaced Bradley Cooper with Scarlett Johansson and turned everything up to 150% for his newest release, Lucy.

In present day Taiwan, Scarlett Johansson plays the titular ditzy blonde American, who falls in with the wrong crowd. After making a drug drop to the amazing Min-sik Choi's crazy-insane crime lord, Mr Jang, Lucy is kidnapped and has a bag of brand new drugs surgically inserted into her body, with the intention for her to be a drug mule into America. However the bag of drugs begin to leak inside her and 'unlocks her brain's full power'.  (God, how I hate that phrase) Eventually her mental capability begins to grow and she starts to gain previously unknown levels of power, whilst steadily losing her humanity.  Morgan Freeman plays an expert conveniently in this exact science, who Lucy contacts to help her control her new-found abilities.

The main problem I had with Lucy was the extent that Besson pushes ScarJo's growing powers and the repercussions that follow.  Whilst Bradley Cooper's failure of a writer in Limitless uses a drug to use his brain's full potential, the film never leaves frames of reference the audience's brain can handle, such as questioning metaphysical theories and entering the veritable minefield of time travel.

The central myth about mankind failing to use more than 10% of their brains gives screenwriters a huge blank canvas of possibilities when the idea of a fully 100% used brain is brought up. A screenwriter must therefore not go completely over the top and make a person a god as Besson does with Lucy. Limitless kept it short and sweet; a person is able to recall every single one of their past memories and therefore have an infinite knowledge of facts they have ever stumbled across. They can master foreign languages in days rather than months. They can make the stock market their bitch.

Lucy's universe, on the other hand, theorises any person capable of achieving 100% brain power is somehow capable of anything, such as being able to control radio signals, regrow limbs and most incredibly time travel. Besson probably knew that the audience wouldn’t believe what they were seeing and so decided to give the straight role to Morgan Freeman to add credence to the claptrap being spouted.

Lucy is the classic case of a film being fantastic until it isn't, and unfortunately it stops pretty early. Halfway through the film, Lucy worries that she is slowly losing her humanity as she becomes more and more powerful. She saves a random French police officer and makes him her pseudo-sidekick to keep her grounded, However, this is barely touched upon again and as a result, Lucy starts becomes uninteresting. The audience cannot connect to her plight and apparent struggle as her powers become too unnatural and her plan to overcome everything is never fully explained.

Despite all these shortcomings, the greatest flaw of the film is its under-use of its villain, Mr Jang played by personal favourite, Oldboy's leading man Min-sik Choi. His vendetta against Lucy reaches ridiculous proportions (similar to the rest of the film) and despite providing entertaining gun fights, he feels wasted as a two-dimensional villain who is just evil for evil's sake. Besson once gave the world memorable villains such as Leon's Stansfield and The Fifth Element's Zorg, played with such glee and sadism by Gary Oldman. Now he resorts to a drug kingpin with pride issues.

If it weren't for it's heightened sense of importance and ego, I would have recommended Lucy as a mindless action film with a kick-ass heroine, but it tries to be too smart and overly-complicated. The film would have benefited from gaps in the action for the audience to wrap our collective heads around the nonsensical development in Lucy's powers, but of course modern-day Luc Besson doesn't believe in gaps in the action. This is why Leon (The Professional in other countries) is considered such a classic.  Character development and empathy is essential in films such as this and that's where Lucy fails in large amounts.

My recommendation? Stay in and watch Leon or Limitless instead.  I wish I had.

Rating - 3/10

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