Lucy

Lucy is a very bizarre, entertaining film. It plays at much grander ideas and even presents a few interesting ones that have little, if nothing at all, to do with the actual plot. This isn't a movie like Prometheus where you can philosophically deconstruct the whole thing successfully and get a semi-interesting result; no no no. This movie is quite dumb, but I mean if you go in expecting that you'll probably enjoy yourself. It uses the very tired premise that "We only use 10% of our brains, what would happen if we could use more."

Unlike the competent Bradley Cooper film Limitless this movie just goes completely nuts with the idea right off the bat. And you know what, something about that is pretty charming and amusing, especially considering it is a Luc Besson film. Besson directed the outstanding Professional as well as the first Taken, but he's also done a lot of simply mediocre films along the way. However he does know how to construct an action sequence, even if said action sequence ultimately has no impact on the proceedings.

Scarlett Johansson plays an ostensibly stupid person (who seems to just be average at the start, not remarkably stupid as the film wants you to believe) who is lured in by an extremely well acted bit part guy with a cowboy hat to carry a case into an office building. Said case contains the plot macguffin drug that turns you into God if you take enough of it as it were; the drug lord is Choi Min-Sik from Oldboy, an amazing actor. After being surgically implanted with a fairly large packet of the drug (hereafter referred to as "blue shit") She has a series of epiphanies over the course of the film and turns into an emotionless robot immediately (there's no progression here, it's just overly emotional nervous wreck straight to killing machine superhero thing). She essentially becomes every X Men as well as Wikipedia in human form.

So if that sounds interesting to you go see the film, don't really need to read the rest of this. I think the dumber you are the more appealing this film will be, which isn't to say the film is bad on any level it's simply a bizarre curiosity and it isn't a fucking incredible bizarre curiosity like Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. One early scene has stock footage of a cheetah catching its prey whilst Lucy is lured into the trap, reminiscent of the much more effective scene in Snatch which actually showed already presented and actively shot elements in the film. I mean the whole movie has Morgan Freeman narrating a bunch of purely hypothetical shit, but because it's Morgan Freeman it somehow kind of works, because Morgan Freeman could narrate the worst piece of literature in the world and it would still be interesting.

Okay, down to the Philosophical point I mentioned earlier. Basically at the end of the movie Scarlett Johansson turns into God, literally (and a 2 dimensional USB drive I guess); which obviously makes precisely no sense whatsoever. However it does bring up the interesting point that God is transient, timeless and the point of his inception is largely irrelevant and meaningless because we couldn't possibly fathom how or when it occurred. That's a good, interesting idea that deserves a better film to have a wrap-around for it, though it is probably too theoretical to use in a formulaic argument and would have to be presented at the point of impasse. The other major point the film makes is that everything humans have created is inherently flawed, obviously true but it even broaches the ultimate sacred cow of Mathematics; naturally the film does this poorly but it is probably true that our perception of Math is not some universal amazing language and that Mathematics is no more an objective science than any other human endeavour. Another interesting point that you could probably make a good movie about, this just isn't it. Meanwhile, a guy with a rocket launcher does an action slide and blows up a door to the white void from the Matrix. Yep.