A prime display of how style over substance can render that style meaningless, "Lucy" starts with some promise, but quickly descends into a hollow attempt to come across as "deep" without doing any of the necessary work.
The entire film is built on a false premise--that humans only use ten percent of their brains. Being scientifically inaccurate is not automatically a film's death knell. Almost all films are unrealistic in some way, and there are others, like "Lucy", that are entirely built on falsehoods. If the film didn't aspire to be more than a fun action movie, this wouldn't be a problem. I could suspend my disbelief and go along for the ride. But when the film expects me to take its story even somewhat seriously, it can be a hard thing to get past.
Everything starts off well enough. Scarlett Johansson's character is captured by an Asian Drug Cartel. They sew a bag of some new drug inside her so she can act as a mule. The bag leaks, and whatever is inside starts to make her capable of accessing increasingly large portions of her brain. When she then escapes, the seeds of a reasonably entertaining chase movie are planted, but they never really take root. Her powers grow too quickly, which removes almost all the excitement from the situation, as she is more than capable of dealing with any threat. We are somehow meant to believe that accessing larger portions of one's brain would allow them to defy the laws of physics and gain telekinetic powers.
The story from this point on largely makes no sense, either. Johansson's character quickly storms the drug cartel's base of operations, shooting everyone she comes across on her way to the leader, played by Choi Min-sik (who I enjoyed seeing in a mainstream production, and who delivered a good performance despite not having a single line of English dialogue). After reaching Min-sik and using her new powers to read his mind, however, she leaves without killing him. Why? There's no real reason. I suppose it's just so he can continue to be the main bad guy and show up a few more times. There are a few more action sequences thrown into the mix as Johansson makes her way to meet with a professor (Morgan Freeman as, basically, himself). These, and the final action bit (the cartel attacks while Johansson is going on some sort of cosmic journey to...I don't know...transcend time or something?) all fall flat, once again due to how overpowered Johansson has become. The ending is a loud collision of sounds and images that grasp for relevance but fall way short. When there's strange imagery in a film like "2001", you may not know what it means, but there's enough of a sense that it does mean something. I didn't get that sense here. It felt like half the time the filmmakers didn't even know what everything meant.
The most damning thing I can say about this film occurred to me about halfway through writing this. The film did such a bad job at establishing its characters and being memorable that I kept using the words "Johansson's character" when discussing her character because I couldn't remember off the top of my head what her name was. It's the title of the film. I could see it out of the corner of my eye on the image of the poster. But most everything about the film was so unmemorable that I didn't realize this for several minutes.
C
No comments:
Post a Comment