Lucy

2/4

Starring: Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman, Amr Waked, Min-Sik Choi, Pilou Asbaek

Rated R for Strong Violence, Disturbing Images and Language

"Lucy," a relatively ambitious thriller, falls flat because it fails to follow the mantra that every movie that doesn't take place in reality must follow: consistency is everything.  Time and time again, we have seen movies that, either due to lazy screenwriting or inept direction (or both), fail to establish a set of rules of what can and cannot happen.  Without this crucial part of storytelling, we can't buy into the premise, and the movie is sunk.

The plot is built on a commonly-held belief that is actually untrue.  That's not necessarily a bad thing (I liked "Double Jeopardy," which had a similar problem with its underlying premise), but the director must set up the plot to the point where we can believe that it's true.  Director Luc Besson doesn't do that.  He presents the theory that a human being only uses 10% of their brain as fact, and builds a movie from that with no sense of fun or humor.  It's a colossal mistake that tanks the film.

Lucy (Johansson) is a young student who has met a man named Richard (Asbaek) that she has had a week-long fling with.  He wants her to deliver a briefcase to a man named Mr. Jang (Choi).  All she has to do is tell the receptionist that she's there and she can hand it off when Mr. Jang comes down.  She refuses because she's only known Richard for a week and he won't tell her what's in the briefcase.  Eventually, he handcuffs it to her and forces her to deliver it.  That's when things go from bad to worse: Richard is murdered and she's forced to become a drug mule.  The drug in question (which was in the briefcase) is a synthetic version of a hormone that builds a fetus's brain, thus making an adult who takes it much smarter.  After she's beaten by one of her captors, the packet that was surgically inserted into her body breaks, and the drug starts to affect her.  Now she has to avoid Mr. Jang and his goons long enough to get to Professor Norman (Freeman), who can help her.

Or something like that.  The plot isn't very coherent, which is a shame, because Besson tries to get the audience to think about what we would do with so much brainpower.  Unfortunately he uses a flawed premise to explore it.  Despite the reputation of French cinema, Besson has never been an arthouse filmmaker.  He appears to be trying to straddle the line between a cerebral science fiction film and a bloody action movie.  He never gets the two genres to fully gel.

The acting is effective for the film's purposes.  With Scarlett Johansson (who fits surprisingly easily into the ass-kicking heroine with ease) and Morgan Freeman as the two stars, you can at least count on them to deliver.  Neither one gives a great performance (both are slumming for the paychecks), but they're always good even when they're not trying.  Sadly, no one else is memorable.  Amr Waked is completely forgettable as her sidekick, but that's partly because he has absolutely nothing to do but play the male version of the "tough damsel in distress."  And Min-Sik Choi has to be one of the least threatening villains of recent memory.

If the premise and how it was handled was the only problem, I might have been able to overlook it.  Done right, this could have been a fun, if brainless, adrenaline cocktail.  Sadly, there are other problems too.  One curiosity is how Besson handles Norman's speeches.  When he's talking about the creation of Earth or the intelligence of other animals, Besson cuts away to shots of whatever subject Norman is talking about.  It makes sense, but they last so long and are so patterned that I thought I was watching a commercial or a NatGeo special.

Then there's how Besson handles Lucy's growing intelligence.  We see what Lucy can do, but not how she gets there.  For example, soon after she wakes up from the absorbing the drugs and escapes her captors, she can suddenly speak Chinese.  I'll buy into that she could perhaps memorize the language in a short amount of time, but just because you get smarter doesn't mean that you automatically know how to speak a language.  It's little mistakes like that that damage film's already shaky credibility.

Finally, there's the climax.  It's not effective because the stakes aren't high and we don't know what exactly is going on.  It's weird with over-the-top special effects (some of which are cool), but I didn't care because I didn't know what it meant to the story.

I'll give credit to Besson for trying for something greater than a generic adrenaline cocktail.  But the result just isn't worth seeing.