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Summer Movie Series

Lucy (2014)

Rated R

Canal+

Director Luc Besson (The Professional, La Femme Nikita, The Fifth Element) has been off his game for some time now. Lucy is a step back to form, but he doesn’t quite get there. The film wants to have more depth than its screenplay allows. In addition to being an action film, a fight film, a philosophical and literal take on the evolution of man, quantum ideas of consciousness, the film wants to explore the end of human existence and what may lie beyond it. Right. But mostly it’s an action film.

Lucy (Scarlett Johansson, Her) is an American studying in Taiwan who hooks up with Mr. Wrong, who inadvertently pulls her into a synthetic drug ring. Forced to be a mule for an improbable narcotic that will either kill you deader than dead, or jumpstart your brain function beyond its known capabilities, Lucy—through a ruptured implant—gets the latter.

At first we know the drill: we’ve seen Johansson as the Black Widow in three Marvel movies now. She can dispatch roomfuls of armed men using martial arts and various weaponry. But once the drug improves her brain function exponentially, who needs weapons when you can control matter … then read minds … then sense emotion in its purest form … then visualize human souls … then affect space and time itself?

Morgan Freeman’s on hand as a renowned scientist whose theories on the mysteries and depths of the human mind are validated by Lucy’s existence. She seeks him out after reading his life’s work in mere minutes. Meanwhile, the leader of the drug ring Min-sik Choi (Oldboy, 2003) wants his product back—by any means necessary. There’s something to be said about a man who continues to pursuit a woman who has stopped bullets midflight and can reverse time itself. He’s pretty cocksure.

All of this can be fun, and if you’ve come to this for the action and fight scenes alone, you’ll get your fill. But in trying to be more than an action film, while not really taking its philosophical components full weight, the movie feels disjointed.

It’s Besson’s incredible La Femme Nikita crossed with 2011’s Limitless (which itself bites off more than it can chew) but isn’t as good as either of those films.

This film might have erred by casting Johansson, who certainly has acting chops and action-film bonafides. Unfortunately, because she brings the expectations of a hide-kicking, name-taking superhero, we’re denied what should have been a jolt from seeing a vulnerable stranger in a strange land transformed into an awesome instrument of destruction and resurrection.

If Besson is trying to speak something to the nature of evolution and violence in society, it gets lost in the clutter.

| Marvin Brown’s Movie Review Archive