Lucy (2014) [DVD]

Contains some spoilers

Back in the 1980s, Luc Besson was the epitome of French arthouse cool thanks to films like Subway, Nikita and Leon. Somewhere along the way however he’s become a marquee name for enjoyable but trashy international B-movies as producer of the likes of The Transporter, District 13, Taken and Lockout, with the crossover point being somewhere around The Fifth Element. Recently though he’s been getting back into the director’s seat on a more frequent basis and his latest offering in that capacity is Lucy, starring Scarlett Johansson.

At the start Lucy seems to belong firmly in the trashy B-movie category, wasting no time to drop its titular character into the bloody hands of the Korean mob in Taipei thanks to being set up by her low-life boyfriend Richard (delightfully overplayed by Borgen’s Pilou Asbaek). What follows is a nightmarish roller coaster ride for Lucy who is forced to act as a drug mule and smuggle a bag of surgically-implanted contraband onto an international flight; only, the package ruptures in her stomach and floods her system with a massive overdose of consciousness-expanding chemicals that start to give her startling new abilities.

It’s a similar jumping-off point to the 2011 Bradley Cooper film Limitless and sounds for all the world like one of those classic superhero origin stories, not far off Peter Parker climbing walls and spinning webs soon after being bitten by a radioactive spider. Certainly the first part of the film which follows Lucy around the city as she works out what’s happening to her and then goes after those who did this to her (which include Oldboy star Choi Min-sik as spectacularly loathsome crime lord Mr Jang) has all the thrills and spectacle that you might expect from one of those crowd-pleasing blockbuster genre efforts. However it’s soon clear that this isn’t where the film’s heart really lies, and as Lucy’s exponentially-increasing capabilities grow ever more godlike and Lucy herself starts to lose touch with her own humanity and emotions, so the film itself also starts to lose interest in little local squabbles such as the climactic gunfight between the mob and the police, which rapidly start to feel as through they’re something of an irrelevance if not an outright annoying distraction to Besson in the latter half of the brief 89-minute movie.

It’s a film that feels fatally flawed right down the middle: even in the early stages, the impressive action scenes together with the suspension and tension of Lucy’s appalling predicament in the hands of Mr Jang are undercut first by brief stock scenes from nature documentaries (for example, emphasising Lucy being stalked by predators like a gazelle by lions in the wilderness) and then by cutaways to a lecture being given by Morgan Freeman’s Professor Samuel Norman explaining the ‘science’ behind the film in the laziest style of exposition known to filmmakers. It’s Freeman’s thankless task to talk about how humans currently only use some 10-15% of their brain capacity and to speculate on what would happen if this were raised to 20% or 30% which of course sets the agenda for the rest of the movie – even down to the periodic captions announcing “40%”, “50%” and so forth as each milestone is passed by Lucy’s accelerated over-evolution.

The science is bunk of course, and Besson – who also wrote the screenplay – knows it full well but he nonetheless throws himself and the film into it with such forceful abandon and driving action that most people including those who absolutely know better will be happy to go along with it for the sake of the ride; I know I was. Towards the end the film stumbles across some intriguing nuggets of interesting philosophy but the ratio of good to bad theory is at best one in three and you should really fact-check every single thing you hear in this movie before risking believing anything it asserts, because the chances are that Besson is just having a laugh at the expense of the po-faced.

Given that the film loses interest in the martial arts and guns midway through in order to spin off into more high-flying science fiction conceits for its final half hour, Lucy is likely to disappoint those wanting a film like The Raid or even The Matrix. Similarly the general silliness will probably be off-putting for science fiction purists. The film’s bifurcated nature leaves the character of Lucy herself as the only common thread throughout, and much therefore depends on how successfully Scarlett Johansson can carry the movie despite growing less identifiably human and more blankly impassive as the story progresses. Johnny Depp’s disastrous turn in Transcendence demonstrated all too well how badly this can go, but Lucy provides the polar opposite by showing just how much you can get away with if you get the casting right and have a charismatic performer capable of uplifting a movie by the power of her presence alone. Johansson is perfect in the role and truly captivating, just as she was in Under The Skin which in many ways is thematically a bookend to her work in Lucy.

Apart from Johansson, only Choi Min-sik gets anything like a decent look-in from the rest of the cast and he’s really little more than a cartoon grotesque villain. For his part Freeman is merely a narrator who happens to appear in shot, while French police captain Pierre Del Rio (Amr Waked) makes his appearance too late in the film when Lucy’s (and the film’s) interest in humans is already fast waning. The only interesting thing he does is to immediately decide to believe in Lucy’s powers and her mission rather than provide conflict by initially opposing her before subsequently being won around, as would normally happen in run-of-the-mill thrillers. Unfortunately with that function removed he has little to do other than look perpetually startled at Lucy’s abilities; his big moment should come in a climactic shoot-out with Mr Jang’s forces but by then the film has lost interest and moved on.

What it’s gone on to is Lucy’s discovery of what it is to have 100% cerebral capacity, which it turns out is omnipotence and omnipresence. She can be anywhere, anytime. Small wonder then that the shoot-out doesn’t concern her, as it’s long been clear that nothing in the mortal realm can in any way harm or even interest her now. What we get instead is something of a Cliff’s Notes version of The Tree of Life in its attempts to locate and explain humankind’s position in the history and evolution of the universe, along with the purpose of life itself within that context. The final scenes come close to providing an updated (and flashier) précis of the stargate sequences in 2001: A Space Odyssey. In fact there are several cheeky touches by Besson that suggest he’s implying nothing less than that Lucy is a modern explanation of what lies behind the sleek black monoliths of 2001: thank goodness for Besson’s vibrant sense of fun and adventure or else you’d be tempted to slap him down him for utter hubris and arrogance by implying an equivalence between himself and Stanley Kubrick.

Ultimately the film arrives at an ambiguous ending that can be interpreted in many different ways but which doesn’t take well to easy explanation. Ironically it concludes with the voiced-over line from Lucy saying “Life was given to us a billion years ago; now you know what to do with it” – well, I’ll be darned if I do, unless the intended lesson is to take a massive overdose of mind-expanding drugs that will kill us in 24 hours. While the film does raise some interesting questions and ideas, it unfortunately does so at such a pace that by the time the end credits roll you’ve pretty much forgotten them in a welter of FX most of them very good, but a few – like a CGI hominin – at best borderline.

Despite all its flaws (and they are legion) the film is nonetheless enjoyable as long as you allow the visceral thrills to put your brain into park mode. Certainly the film looks outstandingly good even on standard definition DVD; while the Blu-ray is no doubt truly excellent, I opted not to get the high definition version as I simply don’t think this has the rewatch potential to merit the extra cost. The film is also unusually rather short (despite the padding offered by Freeman’s explanatory and ultimately entirely unnecessary lecture) and with a conspicuous absence of special features (none at all on the DVD, and just a couple of short featurettes on the Blu-ray) meaning that the cheaper you can get this the better you’ll feel about it in all likelihood. Under those conditions, though, Lucy is well worth a purchase and a watch.

Lucy is available on DVD, Blu-ray and streaming/video-on-demand services now.