JOIN USLucy
English (A) ¬¬
Director: Luc Besson
Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Choi Min-sik, Morgan Freeman
If you have the Need For Cognitive Closure tendency, I’m afraid you will want to refrain from watching this one. Luc Wesson’s latest venture begins with a question that finds a haunting universality in human minds, and conveniently presumes that it has answered the question in due course of time, quite wrongfully so. One billion years; what have we done with life, Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) asks.
An american student in Taipei, she unwittingly becomes a drug carrier when her boyfriend forces her into smuggling drugs for his boss, Mr Jang (Choi Min-sik). The drug CPH4, is accidentally ingested in her system, when she is physically abused by one of her captors. The drug to her becomes both what phoenix tears is to Harry Potter and Kryptonite is to Superman. Or so we can only assume. With little time to live, she approaches Professor Samuel Norman (Morgan Freeman), a researcher in the field of brain usage, to see if she can be saved or if she can bequeath to posterity, the vastness of the universe in her head. In an archetypal portrayal of a one-woman show against the bad guys, coherence precipitates with each passing moment.
Jang’s pursuit of Lucy takes us fleetingly through some dingy hospitals, crowded airports and the Champs-Élysées, where cars overturn faster than you can blink.
Interspersed with arbitrary scenes from prehistoric times and vivid imagery that are either out of place or too vague to comprehend, Lucy makes you wonder where it is headed every few minutes.
A muddled screenplay that has lead to unbridled enthusiasm on both the director and actors’ parts, fails to be deterred by the absence of logic and rationale. Somewhere along those kitsch, cacophonic phantasmagorias, you seem to wonder if the writers took inspiration from The Beatles, for these lines seem to have realised picturisation: “A girl with kaleidoscope eyes...Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes, and she's gone...Lucy in the sky with diamonds.”
Although the movie disappoints as a whole, what is more disheartening are the roles of Freeman and Johansson. Why, I ask them, would you do this to yourselves and us? And I’m sorry Lucy, contrary to your words, as we walked out of the movie, we still don’t know what to do with our lives.