Review of Lucy (2014) by Meritcoba — 28 Dec 2015

No reason or rhyme slows down this movie that has Scarlett Johanson overdose on a new synthetic drug that boosts the usage of her brain above that of the ordinary human and thus unlocks untold superhero powers and a personality change to boot: Scarlett goes from an interesting trashy lady to boring cold calculating **** in a matter of minutes.

But it is all for nothing because Scarlett knows somehow that she has only 24 hours before her body will fall apart or something. So what she needs is the rest of the drug to boost her brain power to 100 %.

I am still unsure what her purpose really was. Did she hope to gain the knowledge to save herself or was her aim to gain knowledge for humanity? Who knows. The movie doesn't linger too much on explaining things. Or it isn't made for creatures that only use 12% of their brain capacity..

A French cop obliges to help her out, while a Japanese drugslord makes matter difficult. It doesn't make much sense. We even get to see a large scale battle between the cops and the gangsters that has the criminals gain the upper hand despite the police being forewarned by Scarlett and thus should have been able to lever the power of the French state against the scum. I would have laughed at this for being silly nonsense, if it wasn't for the fact that nowadays that might even possible. At present the state seems more able to cow their citizens into obedience than stopping terrorists from harming people, which is after all a primary function of the state.

There isn't much more to say really. Engaging dialog? Nope. Intriguing characters one can identify with? Forget it. A larger than life opponent? Not at all. A deep meaningful exploration of the concept? Ba-boom! But worst of all. No explanation of the motivation of the characters is given.

This movie has a script that contains an interesting idea and filled in the remaining blanks with action scenes. Even the action scenes themselves are senseless as they are disconnected. Scarlett's powers change from scene to scene depending on what looks awesome.. At one point the movie becomes pretty awkward because after killing all his minions, Scarlett lets the bad druglord live. The only conceivable reason is that he had to reappear again in the rest of the movie. That is a pretty bad level of writing..

It gets a 5 for being meh.

Oh, it has also Morgan Freeman in it. He is there to illustrate things to the people who use far less than their allotted 12 percent. Totally superfluous.