Imagine a movie star so pretty that her films are constructed as mere excuses for us to be able to stare at her.
Scarlett Johansson even has a Marilyn-like hairdo in “Lucy,” the new sci-fi romp from writer-director Luc Besson.
Unlike Johansson’s triumph of earlier this year, “Under the Skin,” “Lucy” is a bundle of unbridled energy in service of ideas that are incoherent.
Johansson’s title character is a good-time girl who finds herself conscripted by her ne’er-do-well boyfriend into delivering a mysterious briefcase to a mysterious man. She is then further conscripted into being a drug mule whose cargo is an extremely psychoactive substance. When large quantities of the drug get into her bloodstream, she becomes superhuman. Amid all this, Besson’s breathless, heavy-handed direction is as laughable as the story.
Lucy’s motivations throughout the film are unclear. Is she out for revenge? To save humanity? To help the French authorities nab a drug kingpin? Besson doesn’t care. Like the science, the storytelling is junk.
The action sequences are at times thrilling, but mostly they are dull. Lucy struts through dangerous situation after dangerous situation, which would be exciting if we didn’t already know she is invincible. The drug has given her such a high cognitive capacity that she becomes a combination of Neo, Carrie White, and The Man With No Name.
If only Lucy were as fascinating as those characters.
Morgan Freeman sleepwalks through another Old Man Gravitas role as a professor who is hip to Lucy’s superpowers. Freeman, whose best work shows immense charm and vitality, isn’t exactly a firecracker here. And with Johansson doing a pithy monotone most of the film, the audience doesn’t have any interesting personalities to watch.
A film as inane and boring as “Lucy” might be watchable if it explored its premise in a more interesting way and with a hero that had some, you know, vulnerabilities.
Why, for example, does Lucy have to become a member of the X-Men in order for the story to be worth telling?
It would have been more interesting simply to make Lucy super smart rather than superhuman — think more MacGyver than Magneto. Then, she could outsmart her foes, and, if her foes are smart, they might have a shot at outsmarting her. It’s more exciting to watch a character get by on her wits than it is to watch her walk up to bad guys and paralyze them with her mind.
In Besson’s film, though, the bad guys never had a chance. They keep firing bullets at Lucy even after she’s demonstrated that she cannot be harmed by conventional weapons.
Guys, you just saw her kill the Crazy 88 with her brain. That Glock nine-millimeter probably isn’t going to do much.
For a film about the human brain’s capacity, the humans in “Lucy” don’t seem to learn very much. The audience won’t either.
“Lucy” — ONE STAR
Directed by Luc Besson. Rated R. Europa Corp and Universal Pictures. 90 min.
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