Lucy 2 (2025) Movie | Scarlett Johansson | Morgan Freeman | Choi Min-sik | Updates & Review

go then e e e welcome back to my YouTube channel where we unravel the magic of Cinema One frame at a time get ready for an Epic Journey Through the latest Blockbusters hidden gems and Timeless classics today we're diving deep into the world of film with our electrifying review join us as we dissect every frame analyze every performance and uncover the secrets behind the Silver Screen so grab your popcorn kick back and let's dive into the world of movie review don't forget to hit that subscribe button and ring the bell to stay up toate with all our latest reviews and recommendations now let's dive in it Lucy 2 is an upcoming English language French science fiction action film will be written and directed by Luke Besson for his company EUR pacor and produced by his wife virginy Bess and Silla it is an English language film shot in Taipei Paris and New York City it will star Scarlet Johansson Morgan Freeman Choy minck and Amma wake Joe Hanson portrays the titular character a woman who gains psychokinetic abilities when a neut Tropic psychedelic drug is absorbed into her bloodstream we've all seen enough comic book films where the main character starts out as your average Joe and eventually has something extraordinary happen to them that turns them into an above average Joe in the case of Luke besson's Lucy we are given a similar story but with an added Twist of attempting to add legitimate science to the mix I use the word attempt intentionally because that is simp the best word I can use to describe the nonsensical Direction the plot took cue the Neil degrass Tyson Fanboy smarter than me telling me I just didn't get it Scarlet Johansson's titula Lucy finds herself in an unfortunate situation the guy she has been dating for a week forces her to deliver a briefcase with unknown contents to a hotel lobby where she is eventually knocked unconscious when Lucy awakens she discovers that her lower her abdomen has been cut open and that a bag of a very expensive narcotic has been placed inside her she and three other strangers Must ALL smuggle the drugs or risk injury to their families while in custody Lucy is kicked repeatedly in the gut by a guard causing the drugs to leak from their otherwise sealed container still inside her and almost immediately give her abilities that no other humans possess as the film pushes forward her abilities ES escalate along with the risk of her death so begins her quest for revenge against those who violated her as well as her search for the answers as to how to stay alive it is incredibly satisfying to watch Scarlet Johansson wield what are ostensibly superpowers in most movies with this theme the hero eventually reaches some kind of kryptonite plot element followed by someone or something getting in their way to cause added drama to overcome before the climax refreshingly Lucy only gets bigger and more badass throughout the film and it's a lot of fun to see her handle her enemies with the literal flick of her hand where the plot loses me is when her abilities begin to take such a radical turn that it is difficult to take it seriously anymore since the idea is to convey actions that happen well beyond the scope of capabilities of the human brain what transpires doesn't make sense that is supposed to be the point but the result feels like a cheap excuse for lazy writing Lucy works for me in an action movie sense but It suffers from trying to be smarter than it actually is to the point of being ridiculous Scarlet Johansson as the lead is most likely one of the bigger drawers for this movie but her performance is serviceable at best while I appreciated her ability to flip a switch from a scared helpless girl to the Terminator her intentionally robotic performance post transformation felt tiring only a few minutes in Morgan Freeman's appearance seemed to be an absolute waste of his immense Talent as the majority of his performance was spent on electon teaching Exposition 101 on Lucy's progression towards becoming a superhero from a production standpoint I found myself constantly distracted by the odd choice of what was shown on screen in between actual scenes every few minutes we are reminded Ed of just how close to fully capacity Lucy's brain has developed which does more to give me a good understanding of how much of movie is left rather than move the story along there are also several random additions that seem completely out of place and time that were more distracting than entertaining the visual effects look for lack of a better word cheap and quickly thrown together Lucy as a whole could have used a good dose of Polish before release Lucy was far from what I wanted in an ass-kicking action film starring a powerful female lead it had the potential to be off the charts awesome but turned so convoluted that it made me want to rush home and watch other movies that quite honestly did it so much better unfortunately this film acts more as an advertisement for the upcoming Age of Ultron where I look forward to seeing Scarlet Johansson with a bit more depth sadly the ENT aining action sequences in the second act just aren't enough to make Lucy anything more than that for some reason I was of the belief that Luke Besson was a skillful and influential director perhaps the memories of Leon 1994 and The Fifth Element 1997 reverberate more vividly in my mind than I thought or maybe it's simply that he boasts a cool sounding French name but I have always had the impression that he is an a able to successfully mix action and imaginative Concepts into lasting works for budding ciles to admire and discuss then after watching and ultimately being underwhelmed by the surprisingly slight Lucy I perused his list of films as director producer would have taken too long noted those that I have seen and realized why his latest effort wasn't the exhilarating experience I hoped it would be the messenger the story of Joan of Ark 19 1999 Arthur and the Invisibles won two and three and the family 2013 certainly show that his Trend as a filmmaker has been downward and renders it unfortunate that he only wrote and didn't direct the barnstorming transporter 22 starring then upcoming Star Jason staffen and the guilty pleasure though poor I'll admit comedy that finally saw Salma he and Penelope crw team up Bandit us 2006 it appears that he is retaining his status as important thanks to the lasting appeal of his Classics and given how much I love The Fifth Element thanks largely in part to My admiration of Miller jovic though I can almost accept that Lucy though could have been a film made by anyone and is neither a comeback or Progressive in the least without being action-packed enough for the short attention span crowd or clever enough for the intellectuals Lucy is like a science class version of a punk rock song short Fast and Loud Scarlet Johansson is good as the drug injected victim of Black Market smuggling turned astronomical force of Vengeance boasting the ability to control the full capacity of her brain as well as others pardon the brief plot outline and there is no shortage of memorable set pieces but the casting of Morgan Freeman as yet another wise old man with a Steely voice reeks of desperation as do the included Snippets of the way in which nature supposedly adapts and utilizes its ick I did not need to see YouTube quality video of animals mating to know that it is what animals do what I needed was a longer running time and a more patient approach as well as an ending that didn't Venture way into the realm of inaccessibility this is not a movie that provokes thought or that will inspire debate every time an idea or scenario arises that might create a train of intense thought it is soon shot down by either a bullet or even more lethal stare from the angry heroin but in one trait it does share with the Fifth Element at least it's never boring for me there is such a thing as an impenetrable director simply put I find some directors utterly bulletproof I can't find any openings to begin engaging with their work be it positively negatively or complexly this is similar to the kind of close- endedness in a text that discourages fandom but you can still talk about those films see Cabin in the Woods a thesis statement cunningly disguised as a film their work is just too weirdly pure their strange conception is perfectly executed and I can't find fault in that there could also be such things as impenetrable writers and musicians but I've never met such an author and music criticism is largely Beyond me obviously the racial politics of Luke besson's Lucy are something to find fault in it's not so much that the villainous drug lord pursuing Lucy is Taiwanese and Lucy herself is the white Scarlet Johansson it's that the film apparently has never considered the racial politics of both that situation and human trafficking in general it's that the film decides the best way to show Lucy's sudden capability and lack of humanity after overdosing on the drug is by shooting a man whose only fault is that he can't speak English later her roommate scoffs at someone who knows Chinese they live in Taipei it's less that the film is overtly racist and more that the film just didn't care which is more Insidious because that's exactly how it gets out into the culture but other than that Luke Besson proves just as inscrutable to me as Bas lummen is why includ cuts to stalk footage to underscore emotional beats because he can to be fair I'm also a little dazzled by the fact that film is as a medium ultimately all about ju position of shots in time so it kind of appealed to me why create an action film with a purpose meant to make us question every value we've ever held that runs a Breakneck 89 minutes because he can why try to make a philosophical science fiction film with the completely Bosch urban legend that we only use 10% of our brains at the center because he can and he can do it well that's the impenetrable part of these directors for me they accomplish their goals so efficiently that I can't fault their goals unless they're actively or passively offensive this is my first experience with Besson as a director and I'm impressed enough to want to investigate The Fifth Element as soon as possible the action is Breakneck I felt like I'd barely sat down when the film concluded and the story economical besson's strange philosophy is explored with beautiful bizarre visuals from the Practical effects of Lucy's transformation to her last and strangest form when she hits 100% title cards reminding us what percentage she's at are used to ratchet up the tension but the film largely rests on Scarlet Johansson who is current enjoying a banner year for her career with Captain America 3 her and under the skin after seeing the Fantastic under the skin which I did not review because I watched it while coming off a bad anxiety attack which is definitely not how you should watch surreal art housee sci-fi flicks I was sure that Lucy and the unnamed protagonist of Under the Skin would be similar performances miraculously their worlds apart Lucy is a nice if airheaded young woman who quickly loses grasp on her Humanity in a strange confident way as Lucy tells the people she meets and stabs about what she knows now she's matter of fact and slightly reverent she makes a phone call as she loses her grip on Humanity while being operated on and it's stunningly efficient the film occasionally uses her distance for humorous intent when a French cop points out that she's killing people during a car chase she simply states that we never really die but is largely more interested in Lucy making sense of the world around her now that she sees through all the Illusions those Illusions are largely the man-made Concepts that organize our lives so we don't run screaming off into the mental Wilderness but it's always worth poking nose in the eye every once in a while especially in such bizarre style Lucy's triumph over Hercules at the box office its opening weekend proves that there's an audience for female Le action films no matter how odd they are so here's to having a ton more Luke besson's movies for me have always been the definition of a guilty pleasure they're usually big loud implausible action-packed Adventures often with a kick-ass heroine in a leading role Natalie Portman in the professional Anne parad in lafam Nikita Miller jovic in The Fifth Element now we can add Scarlet Johansson's Lucy to that list although as far as B movies go Lucy pushes the limit pretty damn far it starts off in Taiwan with Lucy as a naive college student who's being tricked by a guy she's been partying with for a week into delivering a mysterious metal case into the hands of some Taiwanese gangsters so far so good as this early part of the movie plays into the skey underground semi- exploitative tone that characterized the great trashy films in besson's resume like the professional and Nikita he knows how to play it so that we know this is trash and he knows that it's trash so we can all relax and experience the thrill that goes with secretly enjoying something that qualifies as pulp material where the nuttiness comes into play is the pseudo intellectual gobbledigook this is one time where I feel that term is more than appropriate that takes over the second half of the movie and it's so insane and at the same time ludicrously detailed that I can't tell whether Besson really believes what's going on here or not see the film is premised on the myth that humans use only 10% of their brain so what happens if we were somehow able to channel 100% a straight-faced Morgan Freeman I guess there's really no other kind plays a professor who spent his entire career developing a theory about this notion what an amazing way Bas of a career that is but since humans actually don't use just 10% of their brain I hope everyone reading this knows that we're operating in the realm of total fantasy right off the bat anyway but okay Besson wants have fun with this and say what if so I'm on board with it when Lucy hands over the case in the violent exploitation part of the first half it turns out to be filled with bags of blue Powder and she's kidnapped by the bad guy and forc to become a drug mule one of the bags inserted into her stomach in order to smuggle the drugs into Europe of course this drug spills inside her body and turns her into a superhuman as it opens up her cerebral capacity and she starts to access more and more of her brain Powers becoming nothing less than a combination of Jedi SLG goodus slash which who can do literally anything at least before she suffers from the all consuming f of her powers meeting a similar end to her operating system character in her Believe It or Not Scarlet jansson is the perfect person to play this role as she's been labeled as a kind of Superwoman in everything she appears in lately couple this with her and Under the Skin and it could be a Scarlet rules the Universe movie marathon night as soon as Lucy undergos her transformation she becomes robotic and unemotional embodying The Familiar scar screen presence that she seems to be most comfortable with of late but even though the movie is never really boring it's too consistently over the top to be that it does suffer from an inherent lack of conflict after Lucy becomes all powerful apparently these bad guys are still after her as she tracks down the other drug mules she needs the blue stuff to sustain herself killing everyone in her path along the way and showing up at Professor Freeman's house for help but there's just no way that anyone can possibly stop her and so narratively there's no real suspense to maintain despite this it does manage to hold your interest because Besson still wants to wade into the waters a philosophical explanation about the origins of the universe and man's inability I suppose to appreciate and contemplate all that we are in this world Lucy can do this though however briefly and there are scenes in this movie that seem to want to rival the Tree of Life as she takes on the dawn of man and literally comes face to face with her namesake the first Lucy yes that one some of the scientific explanations are so intricate and yet so ridiculous that you wonder how much intelligence was harnessed simply in coming up with passages of dialogue that means so little and runs so deep that in itself is mind boggling in its stupidity and at the same time refreshingly original is this a film that can accurately be called a great bad movie maybe so I can't quite recommend it and yet I sort of admire the audacity it takes to go so out there in such an Unapologetic way perhaps you should just see it for yourself Lucy is Scarlet Johansson's show from start to finish but director Luke Besson was still wise to secure the services of Hollywood's goto provider of gravitus Morgan Freeman to function as what may be the first fully expository main character in action film history expository characters in action films are of course a dime a dozen every other James Bond movie for example produces upon the super spy's arrival in an exotic forbidding new local some goofy local agent whose entire purpose is to appear from out of a nearby Bush just long enough to bring Bond up to speed on the villain's progress before getting himself killed Freeman's second build scientist sets the new standard spending the first first third of Lucy lecturing a hall of attentive European extras on the untapped but tantalizing potential of the human mind the second third bewildered after he is contacted by a young woman whose Misadventures with a Taiwanese designer drug intended to stay with me synthesize and concentrate the miraculous natural agent that kickstarts fetuses in utero have unlocked her mind in unheard of and highly dangerous ways and the final third as a helpless bystander in a stylized slow motion shoot out between the drug Syndicate seeking to recover its product in full kamikazi mode and a conspicuously efficient but essentially faceless Battalion of French police these two opposing forces seek by turns to kill or protect the titula Lucy although an interesting extra psychological wrinkle one of the films approximately three is introduced to the climactic firefight with each side's full knowledge one through hard experience of the futility of its Mission Lucy is by this point using a frightening and unprecedented 100% of her brain is as much a physical computer as a metaphorical one and is therefore well beyond their capacity to injure impede or even inconvenience every step along her road to unfettered mental access is unprecedented as the film is at pains to remind us but her journey begins with a young couple arguing outside a highrise Hotel she is an American rooming with a friend in Taiwan and he is her Shady new boyfriend who was his first Act of chivalry pressures Lucy into delivering a mysterious briefcase to an important hotel guest by handcuffing it to her wrist Joe Hansson has only a few minutes to establish Lucy as a human being the least bit worth caring about her initial Amusement giving way to escalating alarm as the VIP is identified as the requisite unreasonable and scary Asian mob boss and then outright Panic as she is led into a penthouse containing multiple dead bodies and is forced at gunpoint to open the briefcase as the boss and his minions wait from a safe distance brandishing Shields one normally sees used by Riot police or explosives expert these early scenes at least Motion in the direction of dramatic resonance despite their underlying absurdity and Joe Hansson turns in a heroic performance that is way better than the material deserves or frankly can support Lucy through a series of complications so coincidental and Clockwork that they really should be seen to be believed gets exposed to massive quantities of a designer drug that both unlocks her brain's potential and immediately begins tapping it with extreme Vigor soon enough she is blinking her way through a rapid succession of different colored irises and is surfing the internet and hacking into Network servers with lightning agility using two separate laptops simultaneously as her mental acuity increases the humanity Johansson so ay brought to the early going gets squeezed out of Lucy in favor of increased processing capacity and what starts as a standard Revenge plot wanders aimlessly for a little while and then detours into a final bit of highminded gibberish about the biological need to pass on knowledge to others to his credit at no no point does director screenwriter Besson who is the force behind The Fifth Element and the taken and transporter series to name but a few has years of experience with ludicrous High concept pot boilers paint Lucy's new abilities as much of a gift and indeed even spends a few fleeting moments lamenting her steadily degrading Humanity Joe Hanson locks in her performance regarding the bullets flying past her pled head quizzically and her pursuers and protectors alike with a mixture of Detachment annoyance and curiosity she does whatever the role asks of her but as the film starts running low on inspiration it's left to this presumably tragic figure to generate sympathy as well as awe the latter is incent enough Supply the former is lacking during its first half as our newly enhanced heroine is discovering the extent of her upgrades and Freeman unfurls his luxurious baritone in juer position with footage of cheaters stalking antelopes on the African plains Lucy is solid entertainment who knew that utilizing more than 10% of one's brain could be the key to unlocking the secrets of at will body manipulation effortless telekinesis or low-grade mind control we Americans are a society of Underachievers comparatively one moment Lucy is executing an entire room of Hitmen within a scant second's worth of firing time and in the next she has hijacked every screen containing device smartphone laptop TV in Freeman's hotel room by way of dramatic conclusive introduction demonstration of her abilities Lucy having already foiled the drug Rings single-handedly travels to Europe to rendevu with Freeman scientists for reasons that true to established form are thoroughly explained yet make little sense and the mob boss doggedly pursues her his rapidly dwindling supply of disposable minions in tow there are magnificent individual moments such as a police chase that openly flaunts several laws of motion as it progresses through the streets of Paris and a weirdly thrilling interlude where Lucy sits and bustling modern daytime Square then with a wave of her arm akin to hitting a high-speed rewind button travels back to the same location at the turn of the 20th century and then with another back to the prehistoric swamp land on which it was originally built besson's direction is clean kinetic and bracing ftic in a generic John Woo sort of way without being particularly moving though does it ever have aspirations he does his best to keep the visual surprises coming right up to the point where he finally runs out of ideas amidst the unfolding chaos Freeman's character has exactly three purposes Each of which Maps neatly to one of the movies aforementioned thirds one to stand by in amazement Andor befuddlement and smile in Wonder Andor slowly shake his head two to lend some semblance of stakes to the film's arbitrary Final Moments One pictures the perfect audience member yelling please don't kill Morgan Freeman and three to lull the viewer into accepting that his dissertation on brain use the background on which the film so precariously balances has any Merit whatsoever as does pretty much everything else scientific pseudo Babel just sounds better coming from Morgan Freeman more solid more important somehow more plausible Freeman has by now narrated numerous films served as the moral compass and countless others incredibly played both the president of the United States and God but even he isn't a miracle worker the film really shouldn't be expending such effort to involve Us in its story anyway Lucy is an eye popping generally entertaining trifle a windup toy ponderously introduced then turned loose but no more a science fiction it's fairly laughable but as pure action it is lean and inventive occasionally quite fun and feels shot out of a cannon its most contemplative moments come in the form of extended path shots taken from the inside of a burlap bag with Joe Hanson's ragged breathing the only sound Besson may have been trying to fit a pronounce Ed empowerment angle into how Lucy's Mission plays out though he loses it and her along way while it's admittedly pretty awesome to watch Lucy Bend her adversaries and environment to her will she and the film are just on a prohibitively tight schedule there's precious little time for Besson to concern himself with characterization although Johansson is an invaluable asset to the cause of temporarily fooling us Besson even brought Morgan Freeman into bat clean up his presence as always is welcome though his Services here are largely unnecessary I think Lucy would have been interesting to see on the big screen for its visuals and effects Alone the movie starts with Lucy Scarlet Johansson as a student studying in Korea who is involved with the wrong guy Richard play by pyu es be pleads with Lucy to deliver a briefcase to his client claiming it to be just paperwork refusing using to Cur her the package Richard bounds her to the briefcase thanks to a set of handcuffs leaving Lucy no choice to deliver the paperwork as the only person who has the keys to the handcuffs is the person that she has to deliver the package to we later find out the briefcase contains a large amount of powerful synthetic drugs called cph4 Lucy after being unconscious awakes to discover a scar on her lower stomach and realizes she's being being forced to deliver the drugs in her stomach for the Korean Mafia to Europe which by some violence and interrogation by the authorities gets kicked opened integrated into her system with devastating results and side effects for Lucy this results leads to her being able to use the full 100% of her brain capacity and usage Professor Norman Morgan Freeman explains in a lecture that humans start off with using just 10% of their brains and what happened s when we reach 20% or even 40% with a student asking Norman what would happen if we were able to access 100% with the professor not even knowing the answer to that question in the movie we see how Lucy evolved by the percentage rising in her brain and her capabilities expanding turning her into a Lethal Weapon the effects start with her not feeling any pain and controlling her own body to travel through space and time and then on to controlling others and even transforming matter I felt the movie started off good and throughout the movie it developed a good storyline with strength as you can understand all the information that the movie presents to you about the capacity of the human brain I felt the filmmakers did a good job of this Scarlet Johansson once again proves she is not just the tough girl as her sensibilities are shown from beginning to end she has proved time and time again that her talent to portray different emotions is undeniable I'm sure the writers and Joe Hansson deliberately wanted to keep Lucy as far away from Marvel's Black Widow character and I think they also managed to do this Lucy starts as a vulnerable and terrified girl with the situation way over her head to a person with full control of her new found abilities as the movie rolls forward Morgan Freeman's role is a lot less interesting than Johansson's and is mainly used to explain what is happening to Lucy when she is not on screen which I think worked and is clearly written in as a character who is there to keep the audience informed but the fallback from that usage is Freeman although has the look of a professor he surely didn't feel like a professional on this occasion for me Freeman has very little to do in this film though which is a Pity as he could have been used much more although if you were going to get an actor to narrate then Morgan is your man it can't be the same said about Amma wakes who plays police chief Pierre Del Rio who makes more of an impression in his screen time who has to protect Lucy or is that the other way about Luke Besson has great movies to his name The Fifth Element and taken spring to mind which both had a good story and the fifth element has its own unique science fiction world around it similarly Lucy has its own science fiction world around it but try to blend elements and action from other movies such as Inception the Matrix and Limitless which I think they did a good job of full credit to Besson blending a journey to the start of creation as a roller coaster ride especially in an excellent time travel scene set in Times Square which is fascinating and questions the origins of man and to life itself and finally to the cause of creation I felt Luke Besson was evolving just as much as luk evolves in this movie and you may even find it thought-provoking I don't think the movie requires an audiences with certain level of scientific education or open-mindedness in order to understand or appreciate what's going on in the story line as Besson manages to successfully transform a drug Heist movie onto a very good sci-fi thriller using visuals that simply show what is going on and more importantly what has happened in the past the addition of Morgan Freeman to Simply the science is a clever move although his appearance is brief Lucy is one that will inspire you to think deeply about Evolution human nature and life and where we are going overall this is a decent all action SL scifi movie that you will enjoy if Lucy is somehow still more palatable than NOS are and I think it is but I haven't the slightest inclination towards changing the minds of anyone who thinks otherwise because I'm very likely wrong it's thanks in no small part to writer director Luke besson's very unique relationship to Dum Cinema Besson was as we all recall from spending the 80s in France one of the key figures in the ca dup movement a theoretical development in youth oriented film making that privileged the immediacy of style over any kind of depth of psychology or narrative providing an emphatic sensory experience built around the disenfranchised youth of 8s France with more spectacle than sociology I am frankly a bit skeptical of the whole conceit given that the three main figures in the movement Besson Jean Jac Bayes and Leo's carax are comparable only in that the French critical establishment disliked all of them very much but that being said besson's work especially has always had a Tang of Lop to it a deranged candy coated explosion of movement color and bodies that exists most is a sensual Singularity without any strong attempt to extrapolate meaning Beyond feel things in this moment Lucy is definitely candy if it's anything it feels like the Cinematic equivalent of dumping a dozen pixie sticks into an extra large Coke and guzzling the whole thing down in one go first you get the manic energy then you get the feeling that your whole head is vibrated and at last you're worn out and a touch nauseated but it's fun while it lasts and it's kept Aloft by the sheer brassiness and creativity of its stupidity for the first 15 minutes as Lucy establishes its titular heroin played by Scarlet Johansson in a popcorn variation on her under the skin roll surrounded by untrustworthy sorts creeping up on her from all Corners Bess and throws in non deetic cutaways to antelopes being stalked by cheaters or while Joe Hanson is wearing a leopard print jacket mind you in a hopelessly silly gesture that's too clever to tote while being impossible to take seriously and while Lucy certainly projects a desire to be taken seriously with its stoned undergraduate take on human evolution and biology Besson treats these subjects with such fasil in attention it plows through a 2001 esque Dawn Of Man scene in about 10 seconds that even the most heavy philosophical conceits recedes into the same Buzzy rash of colors and momentum as the action sequences not that it matters anyway but the plot involves Lucy being forcibly turned into a mule by a Taiwan drug lord who sews a new drug into her abdomen one beating later the bag has split and given her an overdose of a growth hormone that causes her brain to kick into evolutionary overdrive and so she begins to have access to more and more of her brains carrying power it's a whole movie based on that Hy 10% of your brain Legend and too insistent about that as it's gimmick to write if off as a generic super smart Fantasy on the order of 2011's Limitless no it's married to its absurd pseudo science and one of the biggest problems with the film is that it slows down surprisingly often for expository monologues themselves spiked by a random array of stock footage cut at the speed of light by Morgan Freeman in the thankless role of a movie scientist the kind specializing in all of human knowledge and for a film that lives and dies on the strength of its Gonzo commitment to showing Lucy gaining all sorts of random telekinetic and energy altering superpowers and applying them in glossy aggressively cool set pieces any and all slowdowns are deadly when it works Lucy is entirely dependent on Joe Hanson whose demerits as an actress both perceived and actual are precisely what role needs as she becomes more of an energy being and less human Lucy is represented as increasingly divorced from emotions or personality or comprehensible internal psychology and Johansson is good at projecting that kind of shell without a detectable inner life which sounds like it can't possibly be a compliment but it's exactly what the film wants and in so far as Lucy is pleasurable at all it's pleasurable because it openly asks us to consider only its surfaces and never its confused scientifically illiterate socially irresponsible undercurrents hell part of me wonders if the point of the nutsoid script isn't to specifically discourage the viewer from engaging with it on any level but that of style and awareness of moving bodies and moving bullets this kind of actively shallow film making close to the platonic ideal of besson's filmography in its admiration for Speed and violence playing out in Europe and perpetrated by gorgeous white women manages to be entertaining in fits and starts for basically only two reasons one is that at 90 minutes Lucy doesn't succumb to the so very common sin of indulging itself for any longer than it can tolerate one imagines a version of the film 10 minutes shorter Sha of the scientific gobble digk but we can't have everything the other is that bessin is distinctly good at creating individual moments of viscerally appealing action color and shape the film nears its finale with a bizarre helplessly pretentious scene in which Lucy finds herself blasting through time and space as her body turns jet black in a featureless white room and what puts it over is not that it's dramatically sound Christ no it's not but that the combination of Eric Sarah's feverish score tiar aras's chromik saturated cinematography and besson's own high speed but never incoherent editing push it into a kind of blissful coped up place where the basic texture of the images is itself rewarding and pleasurable it's still more frenetic than anything else and for all the immediate rush that comes while watching it it's an excruciatingly Hard movie to retain any sense of when it's down it's basically a film about the marvels of taking drugs that functions as a drug in its own right it creates manic visions and when it's done you're a little groggy and resent yourself a bit but it's absurdly slick holy surface level appeal is hard to deny and at least it has the benefit of being unapologetically in love with itself as a piece of Cinema back in the 1990s Luke Besson was considered to be in the top tier of action directors infusing his movies like lafm Nikita Leon the Professional and the fifth element with a distinctive European style and intelligence while also delivering a unique action aesthetic it was in the post 200000 era though that Besson really caught the attention of martial arts movie fans not as a director but as the guy who wrote and produced some of the Best Western martial arts movies of the time it was Besson that gave us Jason Statham in the transporter and its sequels marking the Brit as the go to man for non nonsense action movies that he still carries the flag for even now it was Besson that gave us jet lies best English language movies with Kiss of the Dragon and unleashed aadan the dog it was Besson that introduced the world to Parker in the movie District B13 and it was Besson that convinced us all that Liam niss could be a man with a very specific set of skills in Taken Besson continued to also direct including the 2011 buer pick of on sansu Chi which saw Michelle yo stepping into the role of Burma's inspirational Fighter for democracy however it was arguably the movies that he was indirectly involved with rather than his own that received the most attention internationally so with the news that he would be both writing and directing Lucy the tale of an American female living in Taiwan who's forced to become a drug mule by having packets of a dangerous new substance surgically planted in her stomach only to fight back he had our attention Scarlet Johansson would be playing the pivotal role of Lucy having recently got to flex her action muscles as the Black Widow in both the Avengers and Captain America the Winter Soldier she be ably backed up by Morgan Freeman who himself had starred in the Luke Besson scripted Jet Li movie Unleashed akad Dan the dog and the most exciting news for fans of Asian Cinema was that Korean actor Choy Minik would be playing the villain of the piece Minik will be most recognizable to Western audiences as the main character from 2003's old boy however he essentially makes any movie he's in worth watching most recently as the legendary Korean Admiral y sunin in the period epic the Admiral roaring currents so all the ingredients are there for 90 minutes of vintage Besson the strong female lead which promised to Echo the likes of Anne paralo and lafm Nikita the gritty Urban setting of Leon the professional mixed with the Sci-Fi Concepts in The Fifth Element all topped off with the Asian influence that Besson has clearly shown a strong love for over the past decade the story of Lucy is as initially simple as previously mentioned she's an American living in Taiwan and after the boyfriend she's only been dating for a week convinces her to drop off a mysterious suitcase to Mr Jang played by Min siik she's sedated and wakes up to be told told she has a packet of a new drug called cph4 planted in her stomach she's given her passport and told to go back to the US where she'll be picked up by some of min's six lackeys and have the packet removed at which point she'll be free to go along the way though things go wrong when she's assaulted by a pair of thugs and after a violent confrontations the packet tears inside her unleashing the drug into the bloodstream which leads to her being the first human human to be able to utilize 100% of their brain capacity it's the stuff of be movie goodness but it becomes clear from the start the bessin is aiming much higher than a run-of-the-mill action flick after a 2001 A Space Odyssey style opening the whole scene of Lucy being taken is juxtaposed with a deer being hunted by a leopard it's obviously supposed to be very symbolic but the imagery comes across as a little goofy depending on how much you buy into the movie's concept of how time and evolution is all connected or something like that will largely determine how you enjoy the rest of it I say this because you also have an awful lot of Morgan Freeman lecturing on the human brain capacity and the history of humankind which treats us to more symbolic juter position of erupting volcanoes rocket launchers and animals humping each other thankfully for those who are a little lost it regularly FL flashes across the screen the exact percentage of how much of Lucy's brain capacity has been utilized kind of like an idiot's guide to all the philosophical mumbling Lucy of course eventually realizes that something unique is happening to her and as she strolls into a Taiwan hospital with gun in hand something which not a single person seems to notice she orders the doctors to take the drugs out of her in one of many scenes which threaten to be laughable she proceedes to call her mother in the US while the surgeon slices open her stomach and gives a rather bizarre speech about how she can remember the taste of her mother's breast milk and the feeling of her bones growing luckily just like all of the people who have just witnessed Lucy strolling through the hospital with a gun her mother is remarkably unfazed by all of these Revelations I guess it was at this point that I kind of gave up on Lucy it's an extremely silly movie could well be enjoyed but the silliness is handled in such a heavy-handed and serious way that it sucks all the fun out of it Lucy herself is not a particularly likable character she's been dating a guy who's obviously an idiot she shoots a poor taxi driver in the leg just for saying he doesn't speak English in the middle of Taiwan and even kills a hospital patient which she justifies by saying he had a brain tumor which he wouldn't have survived anyway this kind of stuff could have come across as Darkly comical but here it just comes across as unpleasant Min sick also isn't given a lot to do except scowl and have his hands stabbed a brutal experience for anyone to go through but one which he seems to have recovered from in the very next scene he appears in most interesting of all though is the direction Lucy takes in its final third in which instead of making her an Unstoppable force of nature the ending goes for a mix of 2001 A Space Odyssey combined with elements of Akira as she reaches 100% capacity and we're treated to all sorts of time travel and CGI assisted silliness at one point she's almost eaten by a velociraptor no joke all in all Lucy should have been a breezy 90 minutes of SciFi B movie silliness and action however besson's seeming insistence that he was making a bold statement about the nature of humanity too often see it get bogged down in heavy-handed Exposition and scenes that make little sense which only stand out more due to its deadly serious tone while everyone hoped that Lucy would see Besson utilizing 100% of his directing capacity sadly the final product only looks like he reached 50% at best she and three other strangers Must ALL smuggle the drugs or risk injury to their families while in custody Lucy is kicked repeatedly in the gut by a guard causing the drugs to leak from their otherwise sealed containers still inside her and almost immediately give her abilities that no other humans possess as the film pushes forward her abilities escalate along with the risk of her death so begins her quest for revenge against those who violated her as well as her search for the answers as to how to stay alive it is incredibly satisfying to watch Scarlet Johansson wield or ostensibly superpowers in most movies with this theme the hero eventually reaches some kind of kryptonite plot element followed by someone or something getting in their way to cause added drama to overcome before the climax refreshingly Lucy only gets bigger and more badass throughout the film and it's a lot of fun to see her handle her enemies with a literal flick of her hand where the plot loses me is when her abilities begin to take such a radical turn that it is difficult to take it seriously anymore since the idea is to convey actions that happen well beyond the scope of capabilities of the human brain what transpires doesn't make sense that is supposed to be the point but the result feels like a cheap excuse for lazy writing Lucy works for me in an action movie sense but It suffers from trying to be smarter than it actually is to the point of being ridiculous charlot Johansson as the lead is most likely one of the bigger drawers for this movie but her performance is serviceable at best while I appreciated her ability to flip a switch from a scared helpless girl to the Terminator her intentionally robotic performance post transformation felt tiring only a few minutes in Morgan Freeman's appearance seemed to be an absolute waste of his immense Talent as the majority of his performance was spent on electon teaching exposition 101 on Lucy's progression towards becoming a superhero from a production standpoint I found myself constantly distracted by the odd choice of what was shown on screen in between actual scenes every few minutes we are reminded of just how close to fully capacity Lucy's brain has developed which does more to give me a good understanding of how much of movie is left rather than move the story along there are also several random additions that seem completely out of place and time that were more distracting than entertaining the visual effects look for lack of a better word cheap and quickly thrown together Lucy as a whole could have used a good dose of Polish before release Lucy was far from what I wanted in an ass-kicking action film starring a powerful female lead it had the potential to be off the charts awesome but turned so convoluted that it made me want to rush home and watch other movies that quite honestly did it so much better unfortunately this film acts more as an advertisement for the upcoming Age of Ultron where I look forward to seeing Scarlet Johansson with a bit more depth sadly the entertaining action sequences in the second act just aren't enough to make Lucy anything more than that for some reason I was of the belief that Luke Besson was a skillful and influential director perhaps the memories of Le on 1994 and The Fifth Element 1997 reverberate more vividly in my mind than I thought or maybe it's simply that he boasts a cool sounding French name but I have always had the impression that he is an autter able to successfully mix action and imaginative Concepts into lasting works for budding ciles to admire and discuss then after watching and ultimately being underwhelmed by the surprisingly slight Lucy I perused his list of films as director producer would have taken too long noted those that I have seen and realized why his latest effort wasn't the exhilarating experience I hoped it would be the messenger the story of Joan of Arc 1999 Arthur and the Invisibles one two and three and the family 2013 certainly show that his Trend as a filmmaker has been downward and renders it unfortunate that he only wrote and didn't direct the bar storming transporter 22 starring then upcoming Star Jason staffen and the guilty pleasure though poor I'll admit comedy that finally saw Salma Heek and penelopee Cruz team up Bandit us 2006 it appears that he is retaining his status as important thanks to the lasting appeal of his Classics and given how much I love The Fifth Element thanks largely in part to My admiration of Miller jovic though I can almost accept that Luc though could have been a film made by anyone and is neither a comeback or Progressive in the least without being action packed enough for the short attention span crowd or clever enough for the intellectuals Lucy is like a science class version of a punk rock song short Fast and Loud Scarlet Johansson is good as the drug injected victim of Black Market smuggling turned astronomical force of Vengeance boasting the ability to control the full capacity of her brain as well as others pardon the brief plot outline and there is no shortage of memorable set pieces but the casting of Morgan Freeman as yet another wise old man with a Steely voice reeks of desperation as do the included Snippets of the way in which nature supposedly adapts and utilizes its ick I did not need to see YouTube quality video of animals mating to know that it is what animals do what I needed was a long ER running time and a more patient approach as well as an ending that didn't Venture way into the realm of inaccessibility this is not a movie that provokes thought or that will inspire debate every time an idea or scenario arises that might create a train of intense thought it is soon shot down by either a bullet or even more lethal stare from the angry heroin but in one trait it does share with the Fifth Element at least it's never boring for me there is such a thing as an impenetrable director simply put I find some directors utterly bulletproof I can't find any openings to begin engaging with their work be it positively negatively or complexly this is similar to the kind of close- endedness in a text that discourages fandom but you can still talk about those films see Cabin in the Woods a thesa statement cunningly disguised as a film their work is just too weirdly pure their strange conception is perfectly executed and I can't find fault in none there could also be such things as impenetrable writers and musicians but I've never met such an author and music criticism is largely Beyond me obviously the racial politics of Luke besson's Lucy are something to find fault in it's not so much that the villainous drug lord pursuing Lucy is Taiwanese and Lucy herself is the white Scarlet Johansson it's that the film apparently has never considered the racial politics of both that situation and human trafficking in general it's that the film decides the best way to show Lucy's sudden capability and lack of humanity after overdosing on the drug is by shooting a man whose only fault is that he can't speak English later her roommate scoffs at someone who knows Chinese they live in Taipei it's less that the film is overtly racist and more that the film just didn't care which is more Insidious because that's exactly how it gets out into the culture but other than that Luke Besson proves just as inscrutable to me as Bas Luman is why include cuts to stalk footage to underscore emotional beats because he can to be fair I'm also a little dazzled by the fact that film is as a medium ultimately all about ju deposition of shots in time so it kind of appealed to me why create an action film with a purpose meant to make us question every value we've ever held that runs a Breakneck 89 minutes because he can why try to make a philosophical science fiction film with the completely Bosch urban legend that we only use 10% of our brains at the center because he can and he can do it well that's the impenetrable part of these directors for me they accomplish their goals so efficiently that I can't fault their goals unless they're actively or passively offensive this is my first experience with Besson as a director and I'm impressed enough to want to investigate The Fifth Element as soon as possible the action is Breakneck I felt like I'd barely sat down when the film concluded and the story economical besson's strange philosophy is explored with beautiful bizarre visuals from the Practical effects of Lucy's transformation to her last and strangest form when she hits 100% title cards reminding us what percentage she's at are used to ratchet up the tension but the film largely rests on Scarlet Johansson who is currently enjoying a banner year for her career with Captain America 3 her and under the skin after seeing the Fantastic under the skin which I did not review because I watched it while coming off a bad anxiety attack which is definitely not how you should watch surreal art housee sci-fi flicks I was sure that Lucy and the unnamed protagonist of Under the Skin would be similar performances miraculously their worlds apart Lucy is a nice if airheaded young woman who quickly loses grasp on her Humanity in a strange confident way as Lucy tells the people she meets and stabs about what she knows now she's matter of fact and slightly reverent she makes a phone call as she loses her grip on Humanity while being operated on and it's stunningly efficient the film occasionally uses her distance for humorous intent when a French cop points out that she's killing people during a car chase she simply states that we never really die but is largely more interested in Lucy making sense of the world around her now that she sees through all the Illusions those Illusions are largely the manmade Concepts that organize our lives so we don't run screaming off into the mental Wilderness but it's always worth poking those in the eye every once in a while especially in such bizarre style Lucy's triumph over Hercules at the box office its opening weekend proves that there's an audience for female Le action films no matter how odd they are so here's to having a ton more Luke besson's movies for me have always been the definition of a guilty pleasure they're usually big loud implausible action-packed Adventures often with a kick-ass heroine in a leading role Natalie Portman in the professional Anne parad in lafm Nikita Miller jovic in The Fifth Element now we can add Scarlet Johansson's Lucy to that list although as far as B movies go Lucy pushes the limit pretty damn far it starts off in Taiwan with Lucy as a naive college student who's being tricked by a guy she's been partying with for a week into delivering a mysterious metal case into the hands of some Taiwanese gangsters so far so good as this early part of the movie plays into the skey underground semi- exploitative tone that characterized the great trashy films in besson's resume like the professional and Nikita he knows how to play it so that we know this is trash and he knows that it's trash so we can all relax and experience the thr thrill that goes with secretly enjoying something that qualifies as pulp material where the nuttiness comes into play is the pseudo intellectual gobbla this is one time where I feel that term is more than appropriate that takes over the second half of the movie and it's so insane and at the same time ludicrously detailed that I can't tell whether bessin really believes what's going on here or not see the film is premised on the myth that humans use only 10% of their brain so what happens if we were somehow able to channel 100% a straight-faced Morgan Freeman I guess there's really no other kind plays a professor who spent his entire career developing a theory about this notion what an amazing waste of a career that is but since humans actually don't use just 10% of their brain I hope everyone reading this knows that we're operating in the realm of total fantasy right off the bat anyway but okay Besson wants have fun with this and say what if so I'm on board with it when Lucy hands over the case in the violent exploitation part of the first half it turns out to be filled with bags of blue Powder and she's kidnapped by the bad guys and forced to become a drug mule one of the bags inserted into her stomach in order to smuggle the drugs into Europe of course this drug spills inside her body and turns her into a superhuman as it opens up her cerebral capacity and she starts to access more and more of her brain Powers becoming nothing less than a combination of Jedi SLG gooddess SL which who can do literally anything at least before she suffers from the all consuming fate of her powers meeting a similar end to her operating system character in her Believe It or Not Scarlet jansson is the perfect person to play this role as she's been labeled as a kind of Superwoman in everything she appears in L couple this with her and Under the Skin and it could be a Scarlet rules the Universe movie marathon night as soon as Lucy undergos her transformation she becomes robotic and unemotional embodying The Familiar Scaro screen presence that she seems to be most comfortable with of late but even though the movie is never really boring it's too consistantly over the top to be that it does suffer from an inherent lack of conflict after Lucy becomes all powerful apparently these bad guys are still after her as she tracks down the other drug mules she needs the blue stuff to sustain herself killing everyone in her path along the way and showing up at Professor Freeman's house for help but there's just no way that anyone can possibly stop her and so narratively there's no real suspense to maintain despite this it does manage to hold your interest because Besson still wants to wade into the Waters of philosophical explanation about the origins of the universe and man's inability I suppose to appreciate and contemplate all that we are in this world Lucy can do this though however briefly and there are scenes in this movie that seem to want to rival the Tree of Life as she takes on the dawn of man and literally comes face to face with her Nam sake the first Lucy yes that one some of the scientific explanations are so intricate and yet so ridiculous that you wonder how much intelligence was harnessed simply in coming up with passages of dialogue that mean so little and run so deep that in itself is mindboggling in its stupidity and at the same time refreshingly original is this a film that can accurately be called a great bad movie maybe so I can't quite recommend it and yet I sort of admire the audacity it takes to go so out there in such an Unapologetic way perhaps you should just see it for yourself Lucy is Scarlet Johansson's show from start to finish but director Luke Besson was still wise to secure the services of Hollywood's go to provider of Gravitas Morgan Freeman to function as what may be the first fully expository main character in action film history expository characters in action films are of course a dime a dozen every other James Bond movie for example produces upon the super spy's arrival in an exotic forbidding new local some goofy local agent whose entire purpose is to appear from out of a nearby Bush just long enough to bring Bond up to speed on the villain's progress before getting himself killed Freeman's second build scientist sets the new standard spending the first third of Lucy lecturing a hall of attentive European extras on the untapped but tantalizing potential of the human mind the second third bewildered after he is contacted by a young woman whose Misadventures with a Taiwanese design and a drug intended to stay with me synthesize and concentrate the miraculous natural agent that kickstarts fetuses in utero have unlocked her mind in unheard of and highly dangerous ways and the final third as a helpless bystander in a stylized slow motion shootout between the drug Syndicate seeking to recover its product in full kamakazi mode and a conspicuously efficient but essentially faceless Battalion of French police these two opposing forces seek by turns to kill or protect the tit Lucy although an interesting extra psychological wrinkle one of the films approximately three is introduced to the climactic firefight with each side's full knowledge one through hard experience of the futility of its Mission Lucy is by this point using a frightening and unprecedented 100% of her brain is as much a physical computer as a metaphorical one and is therefore well beyond their capacity to injure impede or even inconvenience every step along her road to unfettered mental access is unprecedented as the film is at pains to remind us but her journey begins with a young couple arguing outside a highrise Hotel she is an American rooming with a friend in Taiwan and he is her Shady new boyfriend who was his first Act of chivalry presses Lucy into delivering a mysterious briefcase to an important hotel guest by handcuffing it to her wrist Joe Hansson has only a few minutes to establish Lucy as a human being the least bit worth caring about her initial bemusement giving way to escalating alarm as the VIP is identified as the requisite unreasonable and scary Asian mob boss and then outright Panic as she is led into a penthouse containing multiple dead bodies and is forced at gunpoint to open the briefcase as the boss and his minions wait from a safe distance brandishing Shields one normally sees used by riot police or explosives experts these early scenes at least Motion in the direction of dramatic resonance despite their underlying absurdity and Joe Hansson turns in a heroic performance that is way better than the material deserves or frankly can support Lucy through a series of complications so coincidental and Clockwork that they really should be seen to be believed gets exposed to massive quantity of a designer drug that both unlocks her brain's potential and immediately begins tapping it with extreme Vigor soon enough she is blinking her way through a rapid succession of different colored irises and is surfing the internet and hacking into network servers with lightning agility using two separate laptops simultaneously as her mental acuity increases the humanity Johansson so a brought to the early going gets squeezed out of Lucy in favor of increased processing capacity and what starts is a standard Revenge plot wanders aimlessly for a little while and then detours into a final bit of high-minded gibberish about the biological need to pass on knowledge to others to his credit at no point does director screenwriter Besson who is the force behind The Fifth Element and the take in and transporter series to name but a few has years of experience with ludicrous High concept pop boilers paint Lucy new abilities as much of a gift and indeed even spends a few fleeting moments lamenting her steadily degrading Humanity Joe Hansen locks in her performance regarding the bullets flying past her Placid head quizzically and her pursuers and protectors alike with a mixture of Detachment annoyance and curiosity she does whatever the role asks of her but as the film starts running low on inspiration it's left to this presumably tragic figure to generate simp aathy as well as a the latter is in decent enough Supply the former is lacking during its first half as our newly enhanced heroin is discovering the extent of her upgrades and Freeman unfurls his luxurious baritone in juer position with footage of cheaters stalking antelopes on the African plains Lucy is solid entertainment who knew that utilizing more than 10% of one's brain could be the key to unlocking the secrets of at will body manipulation effortless telekinesis or lowgrade mind control we Americans are a society of Underachievers comparatively one moment Lucy is executing an entire room of Hitmen within a scant second's worth of firing time and in the next she has hijacked every screen containing device smartphone laptop TV in Freeman's hotel room by way of dramatic conclusive introduction demonstration of her abilities Lucy having already foiled the drug ring single-handedly travels to Europe to rendevu with Freeman scientist for reasons that true to established form are thoroughly explained yet make little sense and the mob boss doggedly pursues her his rapidly dwindling supply of disposable minions in tow there are magnificent individual moments such as a police chase that openly flaunts several laws of motion as it progresses through the streets of Paris and a weirdly thrilling interlude where Lucy sits in bustling modern daytime Square then with a wave of her arm akin to hitting a high-speed rewind button travels back to the same location at the turn of the 20th century and then with another back to the prehistoric swamp land on which it was originally built besson's direction is clean kinetic and bracing btic in a generic John Woo sort of way without being particularly moving though does it ever have aspirations he does his best to keep the visual surprises coming right up to the point where he finally runs out of ideas amidst the unfolding chaos Freeman's character has exactly three purposes Each of which Maps neatly to one of the movies aforementioned thirds one to stand by in amazement Andor befuddlement and smile in Wonder Andor slowly shake his head two to lend some semblance of stakes to the film's arbitrary final moments one pick is the perfect audience member yelling please don't kill Morgan Freeman and three to lull the viewer into accepting that his dissertation on brain use the background on which the film so precariously balances has any Merit whatsoever as does pretty much everything else scientific pseudo Babble just sounds better coming from Morgan Freeman more solid more important somehow more plausible Freeman has by now narrated numerous films served as the moral compass and countless others incredibly played both the president of the United States and God but even he isn't a miracle worker the film really shouldn't be expending such effort to involve Us in its story anyway Lucy is an eye popping generally entertaining trifle a windup toy ponderously introduced then turned loose but no more a science fiction it's fairly laughable but as pure action it is lean and inventive occasionally quite fun and feels shot out of a cannon its most contemplative moments come in the form of extended path shots taken from the inside of a burlap bag with Joe Hanson's ragged breathing the only sound Besson may have been trying to fit a pronounced empowerment angle into how Lucy's Mission plays out though he loses it and her along the way while it's admittedly pretty awesome to watch Lucy Bend her adversaries and environment to her will she in the film just on a prohibitively tight schedule there's precious little time for Besson to concern himself with characterization although Johansson is an invaluable asset to the cause of temporarily fooling us Besson even brought Morgan Freeman into bat cleanup his presence as always is welcome though his Services here are largely unnecessary I think Lucy would have been interesting to see on the big screen for its visuals and effects alone the movie starts with Lucy Scarlet Johansson as a student studying in Korea who is involved with the wrong guy Richard play by pyu ASP pleads with Lucy to deliver a briefcase to his client claiming it to be just paperwork refusing to curer the package Richard bounds her to the briefcase thanks to a set of handcuffs leaving Lucy no choice to deliver the paperwork as the only person who has the keys to the handcuffs is the person that she has to deliver the package too we later find out the briefcase contains a large amount of powerful synthetic drugs called cph4 Lucy after being unconscious awakes to discover a scar on her lower stomach and realizes she is being forced to deliver the drugs in her stomach for the Korean Mafia to Europe which by some violence and interrogation by the authorities gets kicked opened integrated into her system with devastating results and side effects for Lucy this results leads to her being able to use the full 100% of her brain capacity and usage Professor Norman Morgan Freeman explains in a lecture that humans start off with using just 10% of their brains and what happens when we reach 20% or even 40% with a student asking Norman what would happen if we were able to access 100% with the professor not even know the answer to that question in the movie we see how Lucy evolved by the percentage rising in her brain and her capabilities expanding turning her into a Lethal Weapon the effects start with her not feeling any pain and controlling her own body to travel through space and time and then on to controlling others and even transforming matter I felt the movie started off good and throughout the movie it developed a good storyline with strength as you can understand all the information that the movie presents to you about the capacity of the human brain I felt the filmmakers did a good job of this Scarlet Johansson once again proves she is not just the tough girl as her sensibilities are shown from beginning to end she has proved time and time again that her talent to portray different emotions is undeniable I'm sure the writers and Joe Hansen deliberately wanted to keep Lucy as far away from Marvel's Black Widow character and I think they also managed to do this Lucy starts as a vulnerable and terrified girl with the situation way over her head to a person with full control of her new found abilities as the movie rolls forward Morgan Freeman's role is a lot less interesting than Johansson's and is mainly used to explain what is happening to Lucy when she is not on screen which I think worked and is clearly written in as a character who is there to keep the audience informed but the fallback from that usage is Freeman although has the look of a professor he surely didn't feel like a professional on this occasion for me Freeman has very little to do in this film though which is a Pity as he could have been used much more although if you were going to get an actor to narrate then Morgan is your man it can't be the same said about Amma wak who plays police chief Pierre Del R who makes more of an impression in his screen time who has to protect Lucy or is that the other way about Luke Besson has great movies to his name The Fifth Element and taken spring to mind which both had a good story and the fifth element has its own unique science fiction world around it similarly Lucy has its own science fiction world around it but tries to blend elements and action from other movies such as Inception the Matrix and Limitless which I think they did a good job of full credit to Besson blending a journey to the start of creation as a role coaster ride especially in an excellent time travel scene set in Time Square which is fascinating and questions the origins of man and to life itself and finally to the cause of creation I felt Luke Besson was evolving just as much as Lucy evolves in this movie and you may even find it thought-provoking I don't think the movie requires an audiences with certain level of scientific education or open-mindedness in order to understand or appreciate what's going on on in the story line as Besson manages to successfully transform a drug Heist movie onto a very good sci-fi thriller using visuals that simply show what is going on and more importantly what has happened in the past the addition of Morgan Freeman to Simply the science is a clever move although his appearance is brief Lucy is one that will inspire you to think deeply about Evolution human nature and life and where we are going overall this is a decent all action SL scifi movie that you will enjoy if Lucy is somehow still more palatable than those are and I think it is but I haven't the slightest inclination towards changing the minds of anyone who thinks otherwise because I'm very likely wrong it's thanks in no small part to writer director Luke besson's very unique relationship to dumb Cinema Besson was as we all recall from spending the80s in France one of the key figures in the C do look movement a theoretical development in youth oriented film making that privileged the immediacy of style over any kind of depth of psychology or narrative providing an emphatic sensory experience built around the disenfranchised youth of' 80s France with more spectacle than sociology I am frankly a bit skeptical of the whole conceit given that the three main figures in the movement Besson Jean Jac bayak and Leo CarX are comparable only in the that the French critical establishment disliked all of them very much but that being said besson's work especially has always had a Tang of L look to it a deranged candy coated explosion of movement color and bodies that exists mostly as a sensual Singularity without any strong attempt to extrapolate meaning Beyond feel things in this moment Lucy is definitely candy if it's anything it feels like the Cinematic equivalent of dumping a dozen pixie sticks into an extra large Coke and guzzling the whole thing down in one go first you get the manic energy then you get the feeling that your whole head is vibrated and at last you're worn out and a touch nauseated but it's fun while it lasts and it's kept Aloft by the sheer brassiness and creativity of its stupidity for the first 15 minutes as Lucy establishes its titular heroin played by Scarlet Johansson in a popcorn very variation on her under the skin roll surrounded by untrustworthy sorts creeping up on her from all Corners Bess and throws in non deetic cutaways to antelopes being stalked by cheaters all while Joe Hanson is wearing a leopard print jacket mind you in a hopelessly silly gesture that's too clever to tote while being impossible to take seriously and while Lucy certainly projects a desire to be taken seriously with its stoned undergraduate take on human evolution and biology Besson treats these subjects with such faasil in attention it plows through a 2001 esque Dawn Of Man scene in about 10 seconds that even the most heavy philosophical conceits recedes into the same Buzzy rash of colors and momentum as the action sequences not that it matters anyway but the plot involves Lucy being forcibly turned into a mule by a Taiwan drug lord who sews a new drug into her abdomen one beating later the bag has split and given her an overdose of a growth hormone that causes her brain to kick into evolutionary overdrive and so she begins to have access to more and more of her brain's carrying power it's a whole movie based on that Hy 10% of your brain Legend and too insistent about that as its gimmick to write if off as a generic super smart Fantasy on the order of 2011's Limitless no it's married to its absurd NE science and one of the biggest problems with the film is that it slows down surprisingly often for expository monologues themselves spiked by a random array of stock footage cut at the speed of light by Morgan Freeman in the thankless role of a movie scientist the kind specializing in all of human knowledge and for a film that lives and dies on the strength of its Gonzo commitment to showing Lucy gaining all sorts of random telekinetic and energy altering superpowers and applying them in glossy aggressively cool set pieces any and all slowdowns are deadly when it works Lucy is entirely dependent on Joe Hansson whose demerits as an actress both perceived and actual are precisely what the RO needs as she becomes more of an energy being and less human Lucy is represented as increasingly divorced from emotions or personality or comprehensible internal psychology and Johansson is good at projecting that kind of shell without a detectable inner life which sounds like it can't possibly be a compliment but it's exactly what the film wants and in so far as Lucy is pleasurable at all it's pleasurable because it openly asks us to consider only its surfaces and never its confused scientifically illiterate socially irresponsible undercurrents hell part of me wonders if the point of the nutsoid script isn't to specifically discourage the viewer from from engaging with it on any level but that of style and awareness of moving bodies and moving bullets this kind of actively shallow film making close to the platonic ideal of besson's filmography in its admiration for Speed and violence playing out in Europe and perpetrated by gorgeous white women manages to be entertaining in fits and starts for basically only two reasons one is that at 90 minutes Lucy doesn't succumb to the so very common sin of indulging itself for any longer than it can tolerate one imagines a version of the film 10 minutes shorter Sha of the scientific gobble deok but we can't have everything the other is that Besson is distinctly good at creating individual moments of viscerally appealing action color and shape the film nears its finale with a bizarre helplessly pretentious scene in which Lucy finds herself blasting through time and space as her body turns jet black in a featureless white room and what puts it over is not that it's dramatically sound Christ no it's not but that the combination of Eric Sarah's feverish score tiari aras's chromik saturated cinematography and besson's own high speed but never incoherent editing push it into a kind of blissful coped up place where the basic texture of the images is itself rewarding and pleasurable it's still more frenetic than anything else and for all the immediate rush that comes while watching it it's an excruciatingly Hard movie to retain any sense of when it's down it's basically a film about the marvels of taking drugs that functions as a drug in its own right it creates manic visions and when it's done you're a little groggy and resent yourself a bit but it's absurdly slick holy surface level appeal is hard to deny and at least it has the benefit of being unapologetically in love with itself as a piece of Cinema back in the 199 90 s Luke Besson was considered to be in the top tier of action directors infusing his movies like lafm Nikita Leon the Professional and the fifth element with a distinctive European style and intelligence while also delivering a unique action aesthetic it was in the post 200000 era though that Besson really caught the attention of martial arts movie fans not as a director but as the guy who wrote and produced some of the Best Western martial arts movies of the time it was Besson that gave us Jason Statham in the transporter and its sequels marking the Brit as the go to man for No Nonsense action movies but he still carries the flag for even now it was Besson that gave us Jet Li's best English language movies with Kiss of the Dragon and unleashed aadan the dog it was Besson that introduced the world to Parker in the movie District B13 and it was Besson that convinced us all that Liam n could be a man with a very specific set of skills in Taken Besson continued to also direct including the 2011 bierig of on Sansui which saw Michelle yo stepping into the role of Burma's inspirational Fighter for democracy however it was arguably the movies that he was indirectly involved with rather than his own that received the most attention into nationally so with the news that he would be both writing and directing Lucy the tale of an American female living in Taiwan who's forced to become a drug mule by having packets of a dangerous new substance surgically planted in her stomach only to fight back he had our attention Scarlet Johansson would be playing the pivotal role of Lucy having recently got to flex her action muscles as the Black Widow in both the Avengers and Captain America the Winter Soldier she be ably backed up by Morgan Freeman who himself had starred in the Luke Besson scripted Jet Li movie Unleashed aad Dan the dog and the most exciting news for fans of Asian Cinema was that Korean actor Choy Minik would be playing the villain of the piece Min siik will be most recognizable to Western audiences as the main character from 2003's old boy however he essentially makes any movie he's in worth watching most recently as the legendary Korean Admiral he sunshin in the period Epic the Admiral roaring currents so all the ingredients are there for 90 minutes of vintage Besson the strong female lead which promised to Echo the likes of Anne paral Lord and lafm Nikita the gritty Urban setting of Leon the Professional mixed with the Sci-Fi Concepts in The Fifth Element all topped off with the Asian influence that Besson has clearly shown a strong love for over the past decade the story of Lucy is as initial simple as previously mentioned she's an American living in Taiwan and after the boyfriend she's only been dating for a week convinces her to drop off a mysterious suitcase to Mr Jang played by Min sick she's sedated and wakes up to be told she has a packet of a new drug called cph4 planted in her stomach she's given her passport and told to go back to the US where she'll be picked up by some of min's six Lackey and have the packet removed at which point she'll be free to go along the way though things go wrong when she's assaulted by a pair of thugs and after a violent confrontations the packet tears inside her unleashing the drug into the bloodstream which leads to her being the first human to be able to utilize 100% of their brain capacity it's the stuff of be movie goodness but it becomes clear from the start the bessent is aiming much higher than a run-of-the-mill action flick after a two 2001 A Space Odyssey style opening the whole scene of Lucy being taken is juxtaposed with a deer being hunted by a leopard it's obviously supposed to be very symbolic but the imagery comes across as a little goofy depending on how much you buy into the movie's concept of how time and evolution is all connected or something like that will largely determine how you enjoy the rest of it I say this because you also have an awful lot of Morgan Freeman lecturing on the human brain capacity and the history of humankind which treats us to more symbolic juxtoposition of erupting volcanos rocket launchers and animals humping each other thankfully for those who are a little lost it regularly flashes across the screen the exact percentage of how much of Lucy's brain capacity has been utilized kind of like an idiot's guide to all the philosophical mumbling Lucy of course eventually realizes that something unique is happening to her and as she strolls into a Taiwan hospital with gun in hand something which not a single person seems to notice she orders the doctors to take the drugs out of her in one of many scenes which threaten to be laughable she proceeds to call her mother in the US while the surgeon slices open her stomach and gives a rather bizarre speech about how she can remember the taste of her mother's breast milk and the feeling of her bones growing luckily just like like all of the people who have just witnessed Lucy strolling through the hospital with a gun her mother is remarkably unfazed by all of these Revelations I guess it was at this point that I kind of gave up on Lucy it's an extremely silly movie which could well be enjoyed but the silliness is handled in such a heavy-handed and serious way that it sucks all the fun out of it Lucy herself is not a particularly likable character she's been dating a guy who obvious an idiot she shoots a poor taxi driver in the leg just for saying he doesn't speak English in the middle of Taiwan and even kills a hospital patient which she justifies by saying he had a brain tumor which he wouldn't have survived anyway this kind of stuff could have come across as Darkly comical but here it just comes across as unpleasant Min sick also isn't given a lot to do except scowl and have his hands stabbed a brutal experience erence for anyone to go through but one which he seems to have recovered from in the very next scene he appears in most interesting of all though is the direction Lucy takes in its final third in which instead of making her an Unstoppable force of nature the ending goes for a mix of 2001 A Space Odyssey combined with elements of Akira as she reaches 100% capacity and we treated to all sorts of time travel and CGI assisted silliness at one point she's almost eaten by a velocerator no joke all in all Lucy should have been a breezy 90 minutes of SciFi B movie silliness and action however besson's seeming insistence that he was making a bold statement about the nature of humanity too often see it get bogged down in heavy-handed Exposition and scenes that make little sense which only stand out more due to its deadly serious tone while everyone hoped that Lucy would see Bess and utilizing 100% of his directing capacity sadly the final product only looks like he reached 50% at best three other strangers Must ALL smuggle the drugs or risk injury to their families while in custody Lucy is kicked repeatedly in the gut by a guard causing the drugs to leak from their otherwise sealed containers still inside her and almost immediately give her abilities that no other humans possess as the film pushes forward her abilities escalate along with the risk of her death so begins her quest for revenge against those who violated her as well as her search for the answers as to how to stay alive it is incredibly satisfying to watch Scarlet Johansson wield what are ostensibly superpowers in most movies with this theme the hero eventually reaches some kind of kryptonite plot element followed by someone or something getting in their way to cause added drama to overcome before the climax refreshingly Lucy only gets bigger and more badass throughout the film and it's a lot of fun to see her handle her enemies with a literal flick of her hand where the plot loses me is when her abilities begin to take such a radical turn that it is difficult to take it seriously anymore since the idea is to convey actions that happen well beyond the scope of capabilities of the human brain what transpires doesn't make sense that is supposed to be the point but the result feels like a cheap excuse for lazy writing Lucy works for me in an action movie sense but It suffers from trying to be smarter than it actually is to the point of being ridiculous Scarlet Johansson as the lead is most likely one of the bigger drawers for this movie but her performance is serviceable at best while I appreciated her ability to flip a switch from a scared helpless girl to the Terminator her int Ally robotic performance post transformation felt tiring only a few minutes in Morgan Freeman's appearance seemed to be an absolute waste of his immense Talent as the majority of his performance was spent on electon teaching Exposition 101 on luc's progression towards becoming a superhero from a production standpoint I found myself constantly distracted by the odd choice of what was shown on screen in between actual scenes every few minutes we are reminded of just how close to fully capacity Lucy's brain has developed which does more to give me a good understanding of how much of movie is left rather than move the story along there are also several random additions that seem completely out of place and time that were more distracting than entertaining the visual effects look for lack of a better word cheap and quickly thrown together Lucy as a whole could have used a good dose of Polish before release Lucy was far from what I wanted in an ass-kicking action film starring a powerful female lead it had the potential to be off the charts awesome but turned so convoluted that it made me want to rush home and watch other movies that quite honestly did it so much better unfortunately this film acts more as an advertisement for the upcoming Age of Ultron where I look forward to seeing Scarlet Johansson with a bit more depth sad L the entertaining action sequences in the second act just aren't enough to make Lucy anything more than that for some reason I was of the belief that Luke Besson was a skillful and influential director perhaps the memories of Leon 1994 and The Fifth Element 1997 reverberate more vividly in my mind than I thought or maybe it's simply that he boasts a cool sounding French name but I have always had the impression that he is an a able to successfully mix action and imaginative Concepts into lasting works for budding ciles to admire and discuss then after watching and ultimately being underwhelmed by the surprisingly slight Lucy I peruse his list of films as director producer would have taken too long noted those that I have seen and realized why his latest effort wasn't the exhilarating experience I hoped it would be the messenger the story of Joan of Ark 1999 Arthur and the Invisibles one two and three and the family 2013 certainly show that his Trend as a filmmaker has been downward and renders it unfortunate that he only wrote and didn't direct the barnstorming transporter 22 starring then upcoming Star Jason staffen and the guilty pleasure though poor I'll admit comedy that finally saw Salma Heek and penelopee Cruz team up Bandit us 2006 it appears that he is retaining his status as important thanks to the lasting appeal of his Classics and given how much I love The Fifth Element thanks largely in part to My admiration of Miller jovic though I can almost accept that Lucy though could have been a film made by anyone and is neither a comeback or Progressive in the least without being action-packed enough for the short attention span crowd or clever enough for the intellectuals Lucy is like a science class version of a punk rock song short Fast and Loud Scarlet Johansson is good as the drug injected victim of Black Market smuggling turned astronomical force of Vengeance boasting the ability to control the full capacity of her brain as well as others pardon the brief plot outline and there is no shortage of memorable set pieces but the casting of Morgan Freeman as yet another wise old man with a Steely voice reeks of desperation as do the included Snippets of the way in which nature supposedly adapts and utilizes its ick I did not need to see YouTube quality video of animals mating to know that it is what animals do what I needed was a longer running time and a more patient approach as well as an ending that didn't Venture way into the realm of inaccessibility this is not a movie that provokes thought or that will inspire debate every time an idea or scenario AR Rises that might create a train of intense thought it is soon shot down by either a bullet or even more lethal stare from the angry heroin but in one trait it does share with the Fifth Element at least it's never boring for me there is such a thing as an impenetrable director simply put I find some directors utterly bulletproof I can't find any openings to begin engaging with their work be it positively negatively or complexly this is similar to the kind of close- endedness in a text that discourages fandom but you can still talk about those films see Cabin in the Woods a thesa statement cunningly disguised as a film their work is just too weirdly pure their strange conception is perfectly executed and I can't find fault in that there could also be such things as impenetrable writers and musicians but I've never met such an author and music critic criticism is largely Beyond me obviously the racial politics of Luke besson's Lucy are something to find fault in it's not so much that the villainous drug lord pursuing Lucy is Taiwanese and Lucy herself is the white Scarlet Johansson it's that the film apparently has never considered the racial politics of both that situation and human trafficking in general it's that the film decides the best way to show Lucy's sudden capability and lack of human ity after overdosing on the drug is by shooting a man whose only fault is that he can't speak English later her roommate scoffs at someone who knows Chinese they live in Taipei it's less that the film is overtly racist and more that the film just didn't care which is more Insidious because that's exactly how it gets out into the culture but other than that Luke Besson proves just as inscrutable to me as Bas lummen is why include cuts to stock footage to underscore emotional beats because he can