Friday, March 6, 2015

Movie Review: Lucy

Lucy (2014)


A woman, accidentally caught in a dark deal, turns the tables on her captors and transforms into a merciless warrior evolved beyond human logic.  Short synopsis of Lucy taken from IMDb.com  

The review: The same day I watched Gone Girl was the same day I watched Lucy.  In truth, Lucy was the object of my rental money on that day, when I stopped at the Redbox and saw it was available.  My wife had remarked before it released in the box office that she thought it looked good, but was both uncertain about watching an "R" rated film and also wasn't sure she wanted to spend big theater bucks to go see it.  She's the better of the two of us in regards to adult-type fare, on the norm.  There are exceptions (see my review of We're the Millers as an example).

Anyway, I asked her if she was interested in watching it with me, and she agreed.  As I said in my review of Gone Girl, my wife doesn't mind films with “R”-rated sexual content so much as she does violence.  Violence, even in PG-13 films, disturbs her.  And Lucy was full of violence, but nearly absent of sex.  Well, there was some animal sex, making a point in the film about cells reproducing.  There was included a brief scene of some female figure, not clearly seen, in a car.  “In the act.”  But as for violence, my wife kept quipping, "Oh that poor security guard," or "Oh that poor bystander," or "Oh those poor policemen!"  She's a kind-hearted sort, my wife.  She thinks about how someone's family would feel if they learned that the person was shot just out of the blue like that.  It's one of those things I love about her.

The director, Mr. Besson, must have told Ms Johansson to try and look as vapid as possible for this scene.  She does it pretty well.  Considering how serious she looks in most of her action-flic roles, this is a different look for Johansson. / Source: hitfix.com

So Lucy had a fair amount of violence.  But where in the plot does all this fit in?  Well by way of story, we have a young woman who is visiting Taiwan (I think it was Taiwan - I was trying to finish that computer work I mentioned in my Gone Girl review when we first sat down to watch Lucy) and she goes to deliver a parcel for her boyfriend to some big high-rise business.  When she enters the building, some violence is done her, and her boyfriend is killed.  This young and rather ditzy girl is then forced into becoming a drug mule, carrying a new type of drug with some alphanumeric name.  As the head scientist guys says, "We haven't come up with a snazzy street name for it yet" (I'm paraphrasing the line here).

Well our heroine, Lucy, played quite admirably by Scarlett Johansson, gets a bag over her head and is all set to be shipped off to some European city to deliver one of the bags of drugs, which has been surgically implanted into her abdomen.  But of course, she ends up being alone in a room with some would-be Romeo, who makes advances on her.  And then when he is spurned, the guy begins hitting and kicking Lucy brutally.  The kicks to her stomach rupture the bag of drugs, and the stuff in such a high dose fails to kill her, but instead unlocks Lucy's brain.  Consequence: She begins to use more and more of her brain's potential.  This induces an immediate change in her personality, making her smarter, more calculating, and nearly unfeeling in both physical and emotional ways.  Remember Mr. Data from Star Trek, The Next Generation?  There you go.  Only, unlike Mr. Data, who is interested in being more human, this gal cares nothing for her humanity anymore.  She is evolving into something bigger than that.

The mysterious blue crystal stuff.  At least the film didn't have the gall to give it some annoying name like "Stank," or "Whack," or Crystal Blue Persuasion." / Source: bloggingbycinemalight.blogspot.com

Like Transcendence, there is some “next level stuff” going on here, but also like Transcendence, things begin to devolve into less and less plausible spirals as the action heaps on.  See, Lucy goes off to acquire the rest of the drugs, using Interpol to capture the other three mules and then having the drug delivered to her so that she can continue to sustain her transformation.  In order to do this, she tracks down the big drug kingpin guy whom she delivered the case to originally, and who then "gave" her this job as a drug mule.  Instead of killing him outright, as she has no qualms of doing with his security guys, she stabs him with knives in both his hands, and then extracts the location of the three other drug mules through the guy's mind.  I guess you’d say that here she goes from being Data to being Mr. Spock.  “My thoughts to your thoughts,” and like that.  There are a few Star Trek inferences I could make throughout this film, as you'll see.

And here is my first real hiccup on the film, if I conveniently leave aside the whole "using only 10% of our brain's potential”-bit.  No, I'll get to that 10% thing later.  Regarding this drug kingpin, why leave him alive if you feel no compunctions for killing his henchmen?  After all, this particular bad guy has connections.  He's gonna send his whole syndicate after you to stop you from getting all these highly lucrative new drugs from his mules.  And if she is so highly evolved, even by this moment, why wouldn't Lucy see that?  Yes, I know the film needs a villain, but being face-to-face with your foe and not killing him, even if you see yourself as being more evolved than that, is simply ludicrous.  It's like Captain Kirk having Khan in his sights and saying "yeah... next time we run into each other, we'll deal with this then."  And sure, Kirk sorta did that, by leaving the Botany Bay on Ceti Alpha Six.  But Kirk had Star Fleet regs and moral imperatives to yank his chain.  What's you excuse, Lucy?

OK, on with the plot.  So Lucy is evolving fast.  She gets the drugs from the cops, who got them from the mules, and then goes to meet Morgan Freeman, who by the way is always Morgan Freeman in any film he is in, so his character's name is not important.  You could call the guy "Morgan Freeman" right in the movie, and people would only laugh.  It's that same old "Going to see George Clooney playing it Clooney-esque in a movie"-thing again.  In this case, Mr. Freeman is the world's leading authority on the neuroscience of brain utility.  He hypothesizes in the opening minutes of the film that humanity may evolve over time to use more of their brain's capacity.  When these characters finally meet about halfway through, Lucy tells him straight out, "you're right, and I'm doing it as we speak."  Certainly the good doctor is taken aback by this.

There are scenes in any film with Morgan Freeman when I have to wonder if he is inwardly thinking, "Damn, I'm good." / Source: jolenejojochan.blogspot.com

So then there is some almost needless action sequences where the drug kingpin sends his minions after Lucy, and she does all these cool sci-fi “next-level stuff” and stops the bad guys flat every time.  It's like Lucy is toying with them, and we as an audience know it.  And yet people are getting shot left and right, including people shot by Lucy herself.  In one instance, she goes into a Taiwan hospital and, after looking at the x-ray display for the patient on the operating table, she shoots him dead.  She then tells the attending, "You would have failed to save him anyway."  Yes, a higher evolved human might be able to say such a thing, but it sure doesn't sit well regarding the morals of such a higher being.  Is not the Spiderman maxim, "With great power comes great responsibility," not applicable here, or what?

Lucy uses some pretty cool tricks to put would-be trouble away from her.  Like when she goes to get the drugs from the French cop in Paris, she causes everyone else in the hallway where the two are facing off to just drop to the floor unconscious.  It becomes a private meeting at just her whim.  Then on board a plane bound for... somewhere (I forget; there is a lot of jet-setting in this film) when the flight attendants come to ask Lucy to put away her computers for landing, she makes one have a spontaneous nosebleed and tells her to go take care of it, then gives another a mental "push" to make him simply decide to go do something else.  Shortly thereafter there is a fairly inexplicable scene in which Lucy's body begins to dissolve because she doesn't have enough of the drug in her system anymore.  It’s kinda gross, the way her flesh begins to decay and crumble before our eyes, but I suppose it is thrown in to show that she had to have the drugs after all, or else... hasta la vista, baby.

Where were we?  Lucy and her powers.  At one point, Lucy also uses her powers to find the very cell phone signal in the air that the drug kingpin is using to call his people on.  She can see the radio waves and decipher them.  And earlier in the film, she returns to her flat in Taiwan, is hugged by her roommate, and then gives the girl a prescription - in Chinese no less - and tells her she has kidney troubles and that she needs to live a better life.  This gal pulls out some real... well not to beat that chestnut for all its worth, but some “next level stuff.”


If Lucy was remade as a comedy.  Wait, you mean it wasn't a comedy before?

So why can't she just make the bad guys drop dead?  At one point, she makes some of them levitate helplessly into the air, and then stops one of the kingpin's minions dead in his tracks with a mental force field when she wants to get the case containing the drugs back.  See, to keep the action going, the kingpin's guys have just nabbed the drugs from Interpol at a Parisian hospital.  Gotta complicate this story all we can, don’t we?  But she doesn't indiscriminately kill those minions.  And yet there is so much indiscriminate gunfire in this film, and so many people get shot...  you'd think Lucy's abilities to do things would almost be a blessing, vs. this random killing going on left and right.  Couldn't she just... I don't know...  say "Deus Ex Machina" and make everybody bad just stop being bad, or drop from sudden onset aneurysms?  I mean, so many people get shot in this film!

In the end, Lucy evolves into a 100% brain capacity kind of girl, and at this point, she evaporates into nothingness.  Some person's cell phone rings, and Lucy says on the text display, "I'm everywhere."  Ooohhh... spooky.  And shades of Transcendence again.  Plus there was some time traveling in there, before she reached 100%.   And a biogenic computer was build, and the secrets of the universe were unlocked, and...  Maybe she even could tell you what happened to Jimmy Hoffa, or what exactly is in the Colonel's secret spices, or if Pi ever has an ending too.  I don't know.  But you get the impression that BIG things have happened.

As for those big things...  I wasn’t super-impressed with the answers given.  For instance, Lucy postulates that the answer to the question of metaphysics and existence is time.  She points out that when you look at a car travelling from point A to B, if you loop the journey and then speed it up, eventually the moving object (the car, in this case, but she says it applies to anything moving through existence) vanishes and all that is left are points A and B.  She says time is the actual factor, not the journey itself.  Now maybe this has some validity (and I'm no physicist or philosopher, but please bear with me), but my immediate counter observation was that Points A and B will also be affected if you speed up time too, as nothing is permanent.  The scene used to graph this hypothesis displays a car in a loop going from right to left on a screen, and when sped up, it disappears and all that is left is the blue sky, the road, the grass, etc.  The problem is, if you speed up time, the grass grows, dies, grows, dies, is cut, is paved over, breaks out of the pavement, etc...  The sky goes black and white and black and white over and over as days pass.  The road decays and falls apart if not maintained.  Trees in the background grow, are cut down, die of disease, etc...  All is in a state of flux.  Nothing is permanent.  Time is a useful variable, but simply speeding it up to prove your point leaves a whole host of other problems.  Time is not a reliable constant in the cosmic equation.  General and Special Relativity already argue, and pretty damn successfully in my opinion, against that.

Speaking of stuff that breaks physics as we know it.  Don't do that.  Please.  It weirds me out.  Seriously, quit it.  Mom!  Make Lucy stop doing that! / Source: jmunney.wordpress.com

Well now that I've hammered away in a non-scientific pseudo-scientific manner, I'll drop out of higher things and just finish reviewing the film.  Did I like it?  Meh.  It wasn’t bad, per-se.  I thought Johansson's performance was actually pretty good.  She goes from being a ditzy run-of-the-mill girl to being like a walking super-computer, and she does it in a pretty convincing way.  Sure, I thought her arbitrariness in dealing out death and justice was annoying, but the plot would have completely unraveled if she hadn't been a bit arbitrary.  And yes, I think the filmmakers were just using really cool ideas and really cool CGI effects sometimes when they wanted to make Lucy do another "poof, I'm almost god-like now" move.  But I found Johansson's rendition of it all to be pretty convincing.  She played the role to the hilt, and that I could respect.

As for the rest of the movie...  I could pass.  The action was sudden and fairly graphic, there was a lot of needless bloodshed, and the rest of the acting was nothing special.  The drug kingpin was decently menacing but not too heavy, so that was OK.  Morgan Freeman was Morgan Freeman to a "T."  That's about it, I guess.

Oh yes, this was a visually very pretty film too.  The scenes used to engage the audience, such as the intercut scenes of a cheetah chasing down a gazelle on the plain, when Lucy is being dragged into the Kingpin's inner sanctum, were visually arresting.   The color in the film seemed very vibrant.  I think the filmmaker had a good eye for visuals and for sound too.  Perhaps you know the way David Fincher films all have a certain color to them, and how you can spot a Fincher film from a distance by the color tones and the camera work?  This French guy who wrote and directed Lucy is like that too.  Look at The Fifth Element (also by Luc Besson).  Another film with a lot of vibrant color and distinctiveness.

Thankfully for our heros in this film, the bad guys' shooting is represented by this cartoon. / Source: tvtropes.org

On the other hand, I don't know if I'd throw down big bucks to see another movie by him, if this is what he comes up with by way of plot.  From what I've seen on the guy's other works, they all seem a bit... off.  Lucy was interesting, but it was also hyper-violent, pseudo-scientific, and ultimately a bit baffling.  In the film's end, for instance, Lucy goes back in time before she finally turns into an omniscient and omnipresent being.  She meets our supposed first progenitor, we are given to believe, and there is a scene in which she does the whole "Adam and God nearly touching fingers" thing.  It's all very stylized and kinda...  well out there.  For me, it was a fun watch, but the metaphysics I could leave.

Lucy is only recommended if you like sci-fi, don't mind excessive gun violence, don't mind some babble about semi-deep stuff that instead feels very shallow, and like seeing Scarlet Johansson in action.  If you liked Transcendence (with Johnny Depp that is, and not the concept itself), this may be right up your alley.  But Johansson is better looking than Depp by far (in this guy’s opinion, at least), and seeing her strutting around and being all “next level stuff” was not too bad on my eyes.  But as I said in my other review, I rented Gone Girl for fifty cents on Redbox's promo deal, and Lucy was what I paid the whole buck and a half for.  In retrospect, I'd say Gone Girl was worth the buck and a half (despite my unsettled feelings on that film), and Lucy was worth the fifty cent part of the equation.


The parting comment:


Speaking of classic action films.  "Either give me that tape, or punch me in the face."

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