Oh, boy.
Well, here goes nothing. In “Lucy”, Scarlett Johansson stars as the title character who begins to access more and more of her brain after accidently being injected with an experimental drug. Morgan Freeman costars as Luc Besson writes and directs.
The trailer for this film made it look like the film was going to be very, very bad; awkward dialogue paired with that awful Besson “humor” where random violence is supposed to be funny (because it’s a riot and totally hashtag relatable when someone shoots a cab driver for not speaking English in Taiwan, right?). Well rest easy because “Lucy” isn’t as bad as the commercials made it out to be; it’s worse.
I don’t think I have ever seen a movie try to be so smart, and then end up being so dumb. For the whole film, “Lucy” tries to ask questions while giving the impression that it has all the answers. It then pulls the rug out from under the audience in a messy (and moronic) climax. Seriously, by the time the film was wrapping up its painfully long 88 minute run time, I didn’t know what was going on. And you know you you’ve lost a filmgoer’s interest when I was questioning why a character still had a flip phone in the year 2014 instead of pondering what had just happened during the climax.
The film’s main interest point (at least in its own pretentious mind) is “oh boy, what’s going to happen when Lucy reaches 100% access of her brain?!” Only thing is, you don’t care. The more intelligent Lucy gets, the more dumb the movie gets. By the time Lucy has accessed 30% of her brain (instead of the normal person’s 10%) she can already throw other human beings with her mind. So do I really care to wait and find out what is going to happen when she reaches 70%? Spoiler: No, I don’t.
If this was a sitcom, it would be called “I Hate Lucy” (OK that was a lob down the middle). I just didn’t like much of anything in this movie. Besson does know how to shoot an action sequence, as demonstrated by the final 15 minutes being the only enjoyable part of “The Family”, and once again his climatic action scene is the highlight of the film. It’s fun enough when the guns are going off, but the fight isn’t enough to distract you from a plot that has become unintentionally hilarious.
“Lucy” is too moronic to be a smart sci-fi and too boring to constitute as dumb fun. The film doesn’t know what it wants to be, nor what message it wants to send. Really all I got out of it is “drugs are bad, m’kay?”. Johansson is an emotionless robot for most of the film, and nothing in the film is engaging. The film maintains that human beings use 10% of their brain; this film would be lucky if the people who made it exhumed anything over two.
Critics Rating: 3/10
