Movie Review: ‘Lucy’

Director: Luc Besson

Cast: Scarlet Johansson, Morgan Freeman, Amr Waked, Min-Sik Choi

Plot: American tourist Lucy gets convinced to drop of a delivery for some shady characters. The delivery turns out to be a new super drug. The gangsters hide one of the four bags of drugs in her stomach. When the bag breaks open and the drugs enter her system it causes her brain function to increase rapidly, giving her super powers and opening up the secrets of the universe.

Review: If you’ve seen the trailer you might be expecting something pretty actiony, especially as it’s billed as being from the director of The Fifth Element. This is somewhat misrepresentative. There is a bit of action, most notably a well paced, exciting car chase through Paris, but the central thrust of the plot is a mish-mash of sci-fi and philosophy about the nature of the universe and human potential.

It’s a shame that it’s so completely dumb. Like…really, really dumb. That isn’t to say you shouldn’t see it. I’ll explain why further down.

The movie begins with Lucy’s skeezy boyfriend trying to convince her to make a drop. Suddenly there’s a shot of a mouse sniffing a mouse trap. Then she starts taking the suitcase in the hotel and there’s a clip of a cheetah stalking a gazzelle. Before long we get an entire montage of stock footage of animals fucking. Then during a science lecture there’s old footage of a magician. We don’t know if there was a special on stock footage or that the editor was drug but the first half of the movie has a really weird habit of slotting in stock footage and nature documentary clips every couple of minutes. To say that it ruins the flow of the movie is an understatement, and considering how drawn out the first act is this is a major problem.

Then there’s the way the concept is handed. Let’s pretend for a moment that the whole ‘you only use 10% of your brain’ thing is accurate. This movie goes with the idea that science + philosophy = MAGIC. When she starts using ‘more of her brain’ Lucy gets the ability to float, change the colour of her hair, manipulate radio waves, control computers from anywhere in the world, levitate people and do pretty much anything she wants. At the end of the movie she winds up going Tetsuo and announces plans to turn herself into a computer before travelling through time and seeing the birth of the universe.

And by birth I mean giant space sperm flying into a black hole. This brings us to the reason why you should consider checking this out: it’s bloody funny. It’s not meant to be, but we laughed so much. Random footage of animals mating, the nutbag science that not even Morgan Freeman can make convincing and the ever increasingly ridiculous superpowers – it’s got plenty of hilarious moments. Get yourself in the right frame of mind )and by that I mean a couple of strong drinks) and this is a fun night out. You’ll be laughing about the Magical Space USB for days.

It is a shame to see a talent like Scarlett Johansson in a dopey movie like this. Over the past week we’d watched Her, Don Jon and Under the Skin, all of which impressed with the great performance. This doesn’t even give her the chance to do anything good as she spends most of the movie is a trance like stance, staring off into space.

Don’t take it seriously and you can have a good time with this one.

Score: FOUR out of TEN