To give you an idea of what type of film this is, in the first 5 minutes alone, Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) is forced by handcuff by her boyfriend of one week (seriously) to deliver a briefcase full of synthetic drugs to a trafficking kingpin (Choi Min-sik, Oldboy himself). This opening scene lets us know right off the bat that we're in for something unorthodox, as it's completely littered with unsubtle, intrusive cuts to a cavewoman (seriously), a mouse nearing a mousetrap (seriously), and a cheetah hunting down a gazelle (seriously). By the end of this setup, Lucy becomes an unwilling drug mule and the synthetic drugs leak out into her bloodstream, causing her to access "more than 10% of her brain" (there aren't quotes big enough for that misappropriation of science) and escape to share her knowledge with the world.
Everything you'd rightfully assume would be a strike against Lucy, from flagrant pseudoscience to lack of pacing and tension, is present in the film, but there's something gleefully insane about this movie. It's a front-row seat to Besson's wildest fantasies without any guardrails. Or guiding mechanisms of any sort.
Most of the fun comes from seeing what egregious mockery of common sense will come next. From aberrations of gravity to fundamental misunderstandings of technology to control over other human beings, by the end of the film, you'll wonder if Besson even knows what a brain is. The dialogue swerves from mundane to gear-shiftingly jarring casual dusting-aways of someone's death and foreshadowings of events like the significance of a cavewoman (seriously) in a matter of seconds. Most spectacularly, though, is watching the film utterly disregard any notion of plot in its third act when Besson decides he wants to transform this action movie into something resembling 2001: A Space Oddysey. In truth, it's actually pretty fun watching this trainwreck.
Not all of the film's negatives are in the "so bad it's good" camp. Morgan Freeman is on autopilot in a minimal role that only exists to accelerate the film towards its breakneck finale. (For reference, the film barrels from 60% brain capacity to 100% in the span of 10 minutes.) The film lacks tension mainly because Lucy is such an unstoppable juggernaut and loses all sense of pacing and structure by the second act. Besson tries to muster up a moment of tension of the climax, but it comes off as ridiculous that, while Lucy is traveling through space and time to access every known moment that ever existed in the universe and uploading it to a single flash drive (seriously), she can't pull a gun away from Oh Dae-Su.
But the main issue is actually the character of Lucy and Johansson, who turns in a career-worst performance, trading in her nuanced personality in Her for (ironically) a robotic, inhuman personality and monotone delivery that makes her difficult to root for. I mean, this is the woman who, just mere months ago, infused a cold, ruthless alien serial killer with humanity in Under the Skin. And, in Lucy, she's essentially playing Abed Nadir with an encyclopedic mind and psychic powers, completely devoid of any emotion or sympathetic qualities. (The film tries to offer a bullshit explanation as to why Lucy's brain-gaining rids her of her emotions because apparently Besson didn't stop and realize that more access to the brain, were such a thing to exist, would result in more access to its segments that regulate emotions as well.)
Pictured: the extent of Scarlett Johansson's emotional depth in Lucy.
Lucy doesn't even have a character arc, only a power arc that resembles an upwards parabolic curve. The film tries to give her a moment of humanity when she calls her mother, but it only serves to highlight the film's ludicrous dialogue as Lucy's listing of all the things she is newly aware of more closely resembles a monologue from an esoteric philosophizing stoner. What bothers me the most about her character is that, for all the powers and abilities at her fingertips, Lucy is not a strong female protagonist because she lacks any sort of personality or nuance. There are a total of three scenes in the film where we get any sort of peek into her life before this event, but they all seem like such afterthoughts that it ultimately amounts to nothing.
She's also, for lack of a better term, kind of a dick. She shoots a taxi driver in the leg simply because he doesn't speak English, triggers a traumatic memory of the death of a potential ally's daughter in order to convince him of her powers, and kills an innocent person on an operating table without consulting the surgeons because she sees that his/her condition is incurable. While the film is, at its best, gleefully ignorant of all possible consequences and constantly in the moment, at its worst, it's an unawarely ugly and reprehensible display of a psychotic criminal doing as much harm as she is good.
Otherwise, Lucy is a film very much in the moment, one that I found equally terrible and fun, but one that I probably won't think much of in the coming weeks nor can recommend wholeheartedly. It's definitely something that I feel is worth watching once, but I can't vouch for the whether it should be seen in a theater (unless you get one with people laughing along with you at the ridiculousness happening on screen). But, hey, if Scarlett Johansson shooting laser beams out of her mouth like Ghidorah is your thing, knock yourself out.
