Posted in: Movies | Tagged: entertainment, film, luc besson, lucy, Morgan Freeman, scarlett johansson

Starting With A Flawed Premise – A Movie Review Of Lucy

Going into this I should say that I am a fan of Luc Besson's films and I like Scarlett Johansson as an actress… plus Morgan Freeman tends to bring up any movie he's in. With all of that said, I sat down to watch Lucy this week and came away from it with some very mixed thoughts.

The premise for the film is based on the conceit that humans only use 10% of their brain. This is something you have to buy into to make the movie work… the problem is that it's not true. And once you throw that out of the premise, the whole logic of the movie falls apart. And this is not the first movie to use that myth as its basis, the 2011 Bradley Cooper film Limitless was the most recent.

But this is a movie and with movies there is a certain amount of suspension of disbelief expected when you sit down to watch any movie… so if we accepted the 10% premise just for entertainment value you could go on and watch the film. But then they ask you to accept a lot more based on that premise, like that unused 90% accesses telekinesis (okay, maybe), the ability to control electronics (wait, what?) and of course omnipotence… that's right, at only like 50% of brain capacity Lucy has the ability to know what was going on all around the world and take control the electronics in a hotel room on the other end of the continent.

Putting all of that aside, you still have problems with this movie. You never find out why her boyfriend needed Lucy to deliver the package in the first place, why the French police officer would help her just because she knew he had a red pen and why if you are going to use an unwilling woman as a drug mule, why do you give her to thugs who are try to rape and then beat her before she gets on a plane? Did all of the unwilling drug mules go through this treatment? And don't get me started on the ending.

As for the acting: Johansson did a fine job and lead the movie well. The one thing you come away from this with is thinking a solo Black Canary movie would work fine. Morgan Freeman was Morgan Freeman whose character only seemed to be in the movie to explain to the audience what was going on and to look surprised that his theories were true.

Besson's directing was okay through the action scenes, but not one of his better films. And I question the use of the cut-away images… for example talking about animals mating and then cutting away to a five second shot of animals mating.. they didn't add to the film but rather they took the audience out of the moment.

So basically, Lucy is a film that started with a flawed premise and ended up being a scattered, unbelievable mess with a very unsatisfying ending.

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