Right off the bat, I have to say: Lucy is a strange film. But that's actually a good thing. The trailers and advertising make it look like your typical Luc Besson action pic, and while it does hew to some of his usual clichés, it's got a lot more ambition under the hood.
The story's quite straightforward: Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) is forced to be a drug mule for a Korean crime boss named Jang (Choi Min-sik). He surgically implants a pouch full of a new designer drug into her abdomen. The pouch ruptures and massive doses of the drug is released into her system, unlocking the full potential of her brain. But it's what Besson does with the film after that point in the story that'll surprise audiences...
Here's an excerpt from my full review:
The story's quite straightforward: Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) is forced to be a drug mule for a Korean crime boss named Jang (Choi Min-sik). He surgically implants a pouch full of a new designer drug into her abdomen. The pouch ruptures and massive doses of the drug is released into her system, unlocking the full potential of her brain. But it's what Besson does with the film after that point in the story that'll surprise audiences...
Here's an excerpt from my full review:
3.5 out of 5. Although you wouldn't know it by looking at it, Lucy is one of the year's most polarizing films, sure to leave some moviegoers scratching their heads and others grinning from ear to ear. It's a far cry from your prototypical action movie, nor is it your standard sci-fi fare. It is, however, enthralling through and through. And it's proof that Luc Besson still knows how to captivate an audience.Had Besson made Lucy in the mid-to-late 90's, then surely Milla Jovovich, Besson's secret weapon for The Fifth Element, would have been tapped to fill the lead role. As it stands, Johansson is a worthy successor to Jovovich, and Lucy is a worthy modern update to Jovovich's Leeloo character from that film: a no-nonsense, super-powered femme fatale who doesn't need someone like Bruce Willis to protect her, because she's perfectly capable of handling her enemies on her own. And handle them she does: at first, Lucy subdues her aggressors with physical force and lightning-fast reflexes, but as she unlocks a greater and greater percentage of her gray matter, she becomes adept at neutralizing her opponents with a mere glance or a wave of the hand, all without so much as breaking a sweat.
Of course, this all but nullifies the hopes of anyone expecting to see Johansson slip into full-on Black Widow mode to vanquish the bad guys. Lucy has been billed as a sci-fi/action extravaganza, but while there are spurts of madcap action (including a giddy Transporter-esque vehicular sequence and a frenetic gun battle which culminates in a gangster using — what else — a rocket launcher to obliterate a locked door), Besson is primarily concerned with unlocking the potential of the story's far-out sci-fi premise, full of musings on metaphysics and human existence. In other words, the movie's DNA is more The Fifth Element than it is La Femme Nikita.
Despite the audaciousness of Besson's grand design, it all hinges on Johansson's performance as the intellectually-enhanced title character. Much like her portrayal of the slinky alien visitor in Under the Skin, the actress invokes an otherwordly quality for the role, coming across as one part alien, one part robot, as underscored by her deadpan delivery and Lucy's zen-like calmness in the face of adversity. But to Johansson's credit, she always keeps Lucy's humanity floating just beneath the surface, and it shines through on occasion, as in a tender scene where Lucy phones her mother as if to speak with her for the very last time. Likewise, when Del Rio asks her why she needs him at all, since she's more than able to fend for herself, Lucy replies with poetic soulfulness, "As a reminder."
And that's essentially what Lucy is: a reminder of Besson's potential as a filmmaker. After a string of lackluster projects, many moviegoers might already be content with writing him off as having scraped the bottom of his creative barrel, but this movie proves otherwise. It's imaginative and bold, and even though its final act may catch viewers off-guard with its sheer amount of metaphysical insanity, it's a testament to Besson's creative prowess that he's even able to pull it off at all.