Movie review: Lucy is low on logic and high on lunacy

Luc Besson directs Scarlett Johansson as a femme fatale in a stylish thriller based on pseudo-intellectual fluff

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If history is anything to go by, the first reaction the maverick French director Luc Besson’s latest offering, Lucy, evokes is no less than polarising. Scarlett Johansson, after 2013’s Her and Under the Skin, is back in yet another experimental sci-fi film, as the eponymous Lucy, an abjectly helpless drug mule who gains access to untapped parts of her brain and seeks revenge on her perpetrators.  However, what starts as a riveting adventure into human evolution packed with high doses of action and slick visual effects loses steam as it goes along, though the film is not without its sporadic moments of fun.

The premise that Lucy builds on is a popular one in modern pop-science. Lucy is trapped in a vortex of the underground drug scene in Taiwan, led by Jang (Choi Min-sik) who washes bloodied hands in Evian. She is forced to transport a new drug called CPH4 to Europe, sealed inside her abdomen. It is the synthetic reproduction of a compound that pregnant women produce in tiny quantities for the overall development of the child. An accidental leakage causes the drug to alter Lucy’s biological makeup and sets her on a one-way transformative journey to access the full capacity of her brain. This arc is underscored by a conference with a distinctly deep-voiced neuro-scientist Samuel Norman (Morgan Freeman) who reiterates that humans can access only 10 per cent of their cerebral capacity. Scenes of primordial existence abound in flash cuts — from apes, leopards, even dinosaurs. But unlike that other experimental drama, The Tree of Life, these almost get reduced to clichéd parallels here.

Lucy throws up a range of potentially rich narrative waves (“time as the one true unit of measurement”, the fallacy of the “uniqueness” of people), but fails to ride them to any satisfaction, plugging the gaps by rampant use of guns and gore. The one powerful scene in the movie is a phone call Lucy makes to her mother immediately after her mutation. Shot entirely in close-up, this evocative delving into childhood memories (“I remember the taste of your milk in my mouth, I want to thank you for the thousand kisses I can still feel on my face”) is the last time Lucy feels remotely “human”. Then begins her free-falling quest for revenge. But unlike the equally bloodthirsty Kill Bill’s Bride, Lucy’s newly-achieved superpowers (controlling her body, others bodies, magnetic, electronic and radio waves among others) give her many interesting ways to wreak havoc, once even helping her make her enemies writhe like marionette on invisible strings. The vivid landscape of the film as well as Lucy’s race against time reminded me of Tom Tykwer’s super snazzy Run Lola Run, though it lacked the raw passion of the classic.

Johansson plays the wide-eyed, stony-faced trigger-happy heroine with aplomb, while Morgan Freeman as the generic ‘brain-scientist’ is just wasted here with pithy dialogues such as, “From evolution, to revolution!” There are no other major characters to write home about, and one wishes the emotional arc of the story was dealt more engagingly with what lay in between ‘my god these guys are going to kill me’ and ‘now look at me kill these guys’. This 90-minute meditation on the complex history of the universe tries to grapple with everything from neuroscience, evolution and philosophy to quantum physics and infinite mathematics, and ends up taking it from the interestingly experimental to the inexplicably bizarre, making it more psy-fi than sci-fi. Ardent sci-fi fans will find a dense labyrinth of cinematic references from The Matrix and Terminator to Akira and 2001: A Space Odyssey and the more recent Limitless, rendering the film almost like a greatest-hits compilation. If you do want to watch a gun-toting new-age Nikita in killer heels kicking bad guys’ butts in an ironically ‘brain’less thriller, then by all means, go for Lucy.