French dirertor Luc Besson has been making big movies for some time now. Unless you knew Besson’s involvement, you’d never know that they were foreign films. He knocked it out of the park with his first two big movies to open in North America – Leon: The Professional (which launched Natalie Portman’s career) and The Fifth Element – but hasn’t had much success since then. He’s produced boat loads of decent movies since then – like Taken – but nothing fantastic. Lucy is his first actually good movie in some time, but even then it’s not for everyone. Lucy may be intense and fun, but it’s also the weirdest thing I’ve seen in wide release in a long time.
Lucy hits the ground running by introducing us to Scarlett Johansson’s titular character and throwing her into the scenario that leads the film. Lucy is a seemingly dimwit American girl studying abroad. Her new boyfriend forces her to deliver a mysterious briefcase to an unknown man under strange circumstances. Like a gazelle unknowingly being hunted by a cheetah, she has no idea what she’s in for. No more than 15 minutes into the movie, she’s knocked out while a bag of a new experimental drug is placed in her belly for forced international transport. When a henchmen kicks her belly, the bag bursts and a dangerous amount of the drug is released into her body.
The drugs that coarse through Lucy’s body opens up her mind. They say that the average human only uses 10% of the brain. Well, with a strange new blue synthetic drug flooding her body, Lucy’s brain begins functioning on a higher level. The longer in it’s in her body and the more she takes, the higher that percentage goes up. As new powers are revealed, her two-fold mission becomes to take down the drug lord and to share her knowledge with the leading scientist in brain activity (Morgan Freeman).
Lucy is like a 90-minute mix of Transcendence and Limitless – only while those two movies were pretty bad, their borrowed and blended storylines are much stronger in Lucy. But, don’t forget what I said earlier. The movie is completely odd – especially in the beginning and in the end. Even if the oddness isn’t to your liking, you’ll find all-out fun in everything else.
(Photo credit: Universal Pictures)
