Review: 'Lucy' (2014)
3rd in a series of 3 pieces about Scarlett Johannson's sci-fi films of the early 2010s
Previously on this Substack:
The first two pieces about Scarlett Johannson's sci-fi films of the early 2010s:
Iron Man 2 (2010)
Under the Skin (2014)
Lucy (2014)
Written and directed by Luc Besson
Imagine a stereotypical movie about an innocent young woman caught up in drug smuggling. You’d expect to see a squad of thugs, an evil overlord who dresses expensively, goons firing AK-47s everywhere, at least one heavy field weapon that goes boom, car chases, the formerly innocent woman fighting her way out with the help of an unlikely ally, and so on.
If you’re a fan of this genre, you won’t be disappointed by “Lucy,” which checks every single one of those boxes with extreme prejudice. But because this film stars an A-lister in the person of Scarlett Johannson, you have a right to expect more.
And you get more: a weird quasi-spiritual pseudo-scientific frame that moves the film into the realm of science fiction. This device has to do with the notion — an often-repeated and obviously very unscientific one — that “humans use only ten percent of their brain’s capacity” but could become superhuman if they managed to double that. Morgan Freeman is here to lend his deep voice to the character who espouses this theory, a sleek professor who seems to have based his whole career on it.
(I wasn’t surprised to see him; either Freeman or Laurence Fishburne turns up repeatedly in thrillers and action movies with a quasi-spiritual and even messianic bent, such as the Matrix movies [Fishburne] or “Salt” and “Last Knights” [Freeman].)
The Professor isn’t aware that a drug kingpin has managed to synthesize and put into production a blue powder that makes his theory a reality. Johannson — an American living, for no reason ever given, in Taipei — is forced into carrying this contraband, squeezed into a plastic sac and sewn into her body. But the sac bursts and she, not the drug overlord’s intended recipient, overdoses.
Because this is a sci-fi movie, the overdose doesn’t kill her but turns her into a god, more or less, because she is now enabled to use more and more of her mind’s “capacity.”
Now at this point the writer (Luc Besson, who also directed) had a choice. He could have departed from the drug smuggling thriller and had Johannson’s character Lucy forget about revenging herself on the kingpin and use her powers for good. Or even for evil.
But Besson is like a racehorse with blinders. He can only see the drug smuggling mise-en-scene. Instead of stopping to smell the flowers or jumping over the rail and taking off to see the Mongolian steppes, he thunders forward. Lots of shootings, explosions, car chases, and exactly what you’d expect from a drug thriller that didn’t have any transforming blue powder or goddess-like Scarlett Johansson. The introduction of the substance and what it does to Lucy does not change the direction of the movie one bit, and it all ends in a massive shootout. What a surprise.
That said, Besson certainly knows how to direct a thriller. It’s like listening to a late-career album of a band that never changed their sound but kept on in a rut, hoping to recapture the excitement of their debut.
After the icy minimalism of Johannson’s performance in “Under the Skin,” I was hoping she would show more range. But it seems she made the choice that the transforming blue powder would make her emotionless. Frankly, her face is less animated than the one she wears in “Under the Skin,” where at least she expresses confusion and wonderment. It’s a waste of her talent, but she looks stuck.
If there are fans of this film, they might be disappointed that I didn’t get into the whole quasi-woo of Lucy’s expanding powers. But it’s all so stupid! (Do a search of your own. The Atlantic, to cite only one outlet, felt moved to publish not one but two articles debunking the “expanded mental capacity” stuff, as if it were a dangerous notion that required debunking.) I suppose that the only people who could take it seriously would be the same people who take steps to extend their lives, claiming that with the right potions and exercises they’ll live 200 years. (God save us from having to live for 200 years!) If they somehow manage it, I don’t think they’ll enjoy it.