While it may be tempting to define the cinematic works of Luc Besson by their many shootouts and macho preens, the director of La Femme Nikita and Leon: The Professional is perhaps most notable for his sense of humanity. Throughout his strange filmography he’s surrounded real characters and their real problems with the clichés of action movie subgenres, turning simple character studies into whiz-bang exploders and whiz-bang exploders into emotional, albeit usually simplistic dramas.
Action second, character first. Weird sense of humor third.
That’s why his latest film, Lucy, doesn’t really work: it’s all plot and no personality. Luc Besson has once again attempted to bolster the story of a single person with cheesy action tropes, but this time the character lacks empathy. The Lucy of the title has accidentally unlocked the full potential of the human mind and is evolving into a godlike being of purpose, but her personality, and indeed anything else that would make her recognizably like the audience, vanishes too soon into the film’s already brief running time to keep her interesting.
Related: Watch Scarlett Johansson in a Scene from ‘Lucy’
Worse yet, the story of her character – a headtrippy sci-fi tale all on its own – doesn’t even need car chases and shoot outs to make it intriguing. Besson’s action chops may be as honed as ever but they’ve never felt tackier. He’s gilding a lily that’s already made out of solid gild. The action detracts from the sci-fi, the sci-fi makes the action unnecessary and at the heart of it all is an impenetrable heroine, and a supporting cast of plot point flash cards trying to pretend they’re alive.
It starts out well enough: Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) is tricked into delivering a mysterious package to a Taiwanese crime boss (Oldboy’s Choi Min-sik), and then forced to act as his drug mule. But the drugs are an experimental new concoction that leak into Lucy’s body and allow her to use an increasing percentage of the human brain, more than anybody else in history. Mind reading, telekinesis: check, check. But Lucy can also change the color of her hair at will and projectile vomit pure intelligence.
Although she is now the smartest human being on the planet, her brain power is increasing too rapidly and could kill her very soon. So she departs to France – because all Luc Besson movies get there eventually – where a scientist played by Morgan Freeman plans to study her for the good of all mankind. But the drug dealers are on her tail, leading to many action sequences that Lucy can preclude with a godlike wave of her hand. And she often does.
Related: The Best Movie Ever: Female Action Heroes
There’s a comic potential in Lucy’s absurdly OP skill set, one that Besson exploits in a clever car chase that finds Johansson’s high-speed vehicle hitting nothing whatsoever (despite many close calls), but Besson plays them for the usual suspense, of which there is none. The joy of seeing Johansson – who sells the fear of her pre-intelligence and the detached genius of her drugged out persona ably enough – changing the world at her whim is briefly palpable, and sometimes exhilaratingly filmed, but the danger is absent by the time she officially possesses the Power Cosmic. And by then the movie is nowhere near over.
So the plot doesn’t work. The action sequences don’t make much of an impact. The characters are either too zenlike to be relatable or merely stock creations (Amr Waked is particularly pointless as a policeman along for the ride). Lucy really is a mess, but it’s not altogether unwatchable.
Luc Besson’s visions of superhuman brain activity are sometimes beautiful, and always strange. As Lucy achieves her final evolution we are treated to a rather absurd notion of a futuristic computer, and a sequence that is perhaps intended as an MTV rendition of Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life. But on meth. These elements are perhaps worth watching on their own merits; you simply have wade through the rest of this messy movie to find them.
And when it is fun, it’s usually fun for the wrong reasons. At no point does Besson – who typically imbues his films with a wry (and sometimes off-putting) sense of humor – suggest that we are supposed to be laughing at Lucy. This is serious business, he’s telling us, but it’s conducted far too seriously. Besson is simply too competent a filmmaker to make all the wrong decisions that could have turned Lucy into an ironic treat. His film is the victim of new ideas forced to kowtow to superfluous old habits, rather than evolve along with its heroine into something enjoyably singular. Lucy is instead a whole lot of things, but not a good version of any of them. It is, at its best, merely a little maddening.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
