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| Directed and Written by Luc Besson |
One of the film news stories of the last twelve months is that Hollywood may be realizing that female targeted and/or led movies can in fact make all of the money, but that wasn't apparent because they weren't putting them out very often.
Once upon a time, the idea of releasing the indie scale romantic tragedy against the Tom Cruise action movie would have been insane, now the romance makes four times it's budget in one weekend, and the action flick still hasn't made it's money back domestically and is relying on overseas markets to turn a profit. One week earlier, the shockingly dark reworking of a Disney fairy tale headed by a nearly forty year old mother of six made over 70 million in one weekend, and kept the Tom Cruise action movie in third the next.
From The Hunger Games, to Frozen, to most of the YA phenomenon, to Maleficent, it's become exceptionally clear that there was an audience that the studios were overlooking. Now, sort of following this trend, we have Lucy, aphilosophical ramble smuggled into theaters as an R-rated Scarlett Johansson action vehicle, and the most bizarre and ambitious movie I've seen so far this year. Sorry Aronofsky's Noah, you were definitely trying, but Lucy takes the cake as far as insane arthouse blockbusters are concerned.
The story of this film concerns Scarlett Johansson as Lucy, an American student studying abroad in Taiwan that finds herself caught up in a drug ring. They kidnap her, and force her into smuggling an experimental new drug into Europe by surgically implanting a pouch full of it in her intestines. After one of her captors gets abusive, the bag bursts and she gets a massive overdose that essentially turns her into Neo.
Note-Incidentally, if you were worried about this film spreading long dis-proven bits of folk wisdom, don't be. Not only does the actual film make it clear that she's unlocked higher percentages of the brain's potential, which is slightly closer to reality, it's just how they explain each new set of superpowers and the actual mechanism behind her transformation is largely irrelevant. They could have claimed she merged with the Invisible Pink Unicorn, and it would have changed nothing about the films plot.-End Note
Anyways, since she has essentially become a living god, she calculates that she only has about a day before she ascends beyond corporeal form. So the bulk of the film is about her trying to get to Morgan Freeman as a neuro-scientist working on a theory that she has become proof of to pass her newfound omniscience onto.
If nothing else, Lucy is one of the most visually inventive films of the year. The first twenty minutes are inter-cut with stock footage of, whatever the director felt would go with the moment. A scene of Lucy being stalked by the drug ring has footage of of a cheetah stalking a gazelle cut in for instance, but after she contacts Freeman's scientist, that gimmick stops entirely. To be replaced with, I kid you not, her brain percentage being put up on screen in white block numerals on a black background. I mean it when I say that this is the most bizarre film of the year so far.
I have never seen a film that is at once so blatant yet so difficult to identify a central theme of. As I discussed with those I saw it with, Luc Besson is definitely trying to make a point, but we have no idea what that point is supposed to be. From what the professionals have said, apparently the idea that the pursuit of knowledge is the ultimate good, but I just wonder what film they were watching because this is just madness.
There isn't actually that much action in it, and what action there is, while definitely well composed, takes a back seat to the mad philosophical ramblings of Luc Besson. The trailers for this film made it look like a 21st Century version of The Matrix, and while there are definitely elements of that film present, as well as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Limitless, and Cosmos of all things, it manages to come off as it's own entity entirely. This is not an action movie, it's an arthouse movie with a blockbuster budget that has some action scenes sprinkled in.
Lucy feels like a film that was conceived of by a genius but realized by a lunatic. One that feels like, with a few runs through the editors, it could be brilliant, but the actual product is something that could only be the result of mad creative hubris. I'm not sure that I can in good conscience recommend it, but I'm not going to forget it any time soon.
Have a nice day.
Greg.B
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