Lucy

Scarlett Johansson interrupts Morgan Freeman’s quiet time to get him to help her turn herself into a USB stick and also manages to come up with an innovative new way to treat brain tumours.

 

Lucy is a 2014 Samsung advertisement directed by Luc Besson and starring Scarlett Johansson and Morgan Freeman.

Luc Besson is a hit and miss director with me. The Professional is one of the best films I’ve ever seen, while The Fifth Element made me want to claw my own eyes out. Lucy is more Professional than Fifth Element, but was still a little too migraine-inducing to ever get a second viewing from me.

Lucy has the kick ass heroine, memorably evil bad guys, and well directed shootouts that Besson excels at. The opening sequence that sees pre-cognitively enhanced Lucy delivering a mysterious brief case to a bad guy is incredibly tense. Johansson plays it wonderfully and the bad guy (some Yakuza-type gangster played by Min-Sik Choi) is delightfully intense. When Lucy first meets him he emerges from the bedroom of a hotel suite where he is performing some kind of chainsaw massacre while wearing a really expensive silk suit. Despite being way over the top, he is nonetheless very threatening. I really liked the way Besson cuts to stock footage of a cheetah stalking its prey as the Yakuza guy and his henchmen stalk Lucy. Yes it’s on the nose and jarringly devoid of subtlety but it just works.

So, the mystery package contains a shipment of CPH-4, a new designer drug. Lucy is forced to be a drug mule to smuggle the new drug into the US. But on the way, she is beaten by one of the bad guy’s henchmen and the package leaks inside her. This drug, a synthetic version of some enzyme a mother releases in tiny quantities to a baby in her womb that causes the foetus to grow. So in the massive dose Lucy gets, it starts her brain’s and body’s cells growing exponentially, ie she begins to use more of her brain than a regular person, accessing cerebral areas scientists can only hypothesize about.

Here’s where the film’s first problem begins. In order to convey this rapid increase in her intelligence, Johansson begins to act like a robot. In fact some of her line delivery and odd head movements reminded me of Data in Star Trek Next Generation, or even C-3PO.

And the fact that she also immediately becomes a La Femme Nikita-type badass is hilariously ridiculous. Here’s the second problem – it’s never really made all that clear what exactly is happening to Lucy’s mind and body as a result of the drug. From what I could gather, the substance causes rapid cell growth (brain cells too of course). But Lucy seems to develop superhero strength and resilience, x-ray vision, telekinesis, and the ability to read people’s minds. It’s all over the place.

Morgan Freeman plays some wacky professor guy who pretty much takes care of all of the movie’s necessary exposition through delivering a lecture (literally) on how human beings only use 10% of their brain capacity and the hypothetical “what if we could use more?”

Lucy is also helped by a requisite tough guy and sort of love interest in the form of a bad ass Parisian police captain who helps her stay one step ahead of the bad guy and his cronies while Morgan Freeman wants to help her find a way to share all her rapidly accumulating knowledge before her cell reproduction reaches it’s natural and lethal conclusion.

Well, I actually hope what I just explained makes sense, because the movie really doesn’t.
It’s a little ironic that a film about the limitless potential capacity of human intelligence is so moronic. Fair enough it is not aiming to be anything more than entertainment, but I need a film like this to have some kind of internal logic – in order for me to be able to suspend disbelief I need the film itself to have a believable inner world.

So, the ending. As Lucy nears 100% brain capacity and thus the point at which her cell reproduction will kill her, she decides that the way in which she is going to share her limitless knowledge is by creating some kind of supercomputer to transfer her mind into…I think. Anyway, this rather cool sequence in which she sort of morphs into a bizarre computer is utterly ruined by the fact that…wait for it…the weird gothic-looking structure that is the computer becomes a fucking USB thumb drive! I can be pretty silly, but even I couldn’t make complete shit like that up. So, essentially, the next step in human evolution is nothing out of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. No. It’s right there on the pages of a fucking OfficeWorks catalogue.

I’ll finish up by saying I instantly despise any script that ends a film by telling me I’m a clueless rube. Lucy ends with the condescending voice over from our heroine to the effect, “So, you were given life. Now you know what to do with it.”

Huh? Umm…let’s see, I need to overdose on a new designer drug and this will make me immortal? Ok, got it.