It all happens so fast

Lucy is a movie from Luc Besson. Besson is generally much more a producer than director and, on the rarer occasions when he does turn to mise-en-scène, one expects something big and flashy, probably involving a super-woman; his signature work is the 1990 La Femme Nikita. He's been unusually busy directing lately, with a trashy mafia comedy called The Family starring De Niro, a Franco-American production, released only last year. The new one, evidently a Franco-Asian product this time, with, again, American stars, features Scarlett Johansson as a wonder-woman, more in M. Besson's line. It starts out promisingly but its concept is too extreme. Lucy self-destructs -- and a heroine who implodes doesn't satisfy the mainstream audience for whom this movie was designed. Perhaps it doesn't matter, if your'e just there for some bright color and fast, loud action, as the Asian market may be (hence the value of the large Korean tie-in and the Taiwan starting point).

But Lucy has ideas, big ones; it just doesn't quite know how to integrate them into a movie. It's almost funny when you think about it the way the movie plugs in its key concept -- that humans use only 10% of their brains and if they used just 20% the effect would be spectacular -- by having a professor, Morgan Freeman, mouth it in a large lecture hall. Can you notice how completely artificial the student "questions" are? Morgan Freeman is the professor, with that soothing voice from The March of the Penguins and many voice-overs since. This is an action film masquerading as a high-concept sci-fi flick, and Morgan Freeman, enunciating rather than acting, is little more than filler on the way to shoot-outs and the spectacular special effects. We're getting a bit tired of these Hollywood-style profs though enunciating devastatingly "important" ideas that, without big stars and a heap of megalomaniac CGI, wouldn't amount to a hill of beans. We're still reeling from the fiasco of Johnny Depp (an actor who dropped out of school at 15) as a prof just a few months ago in Transcendence, whose high concepts Lucy's resemble. Dumb pictures about big brains. A French guy can make them too! I give Besson the edge: his visuals are colorful and snappy.

One suspects a coproduction arrangement that provided Besson with a lot of Korean heavies at a bargain rate. Unfortunately they turned the whole thing into an unusually thuggish shoot-'em-up (Asians transformed into parodies of themselves almost as racist as Ian Fleming's Odd Job), and it all ends in the requisite orgy of meaningless CGI. One walks out feeling absolutely nothing.

Yet it begins hopefully, with a lot of excitement, and Johansson acting her head off as a bad girl in Taiwan who gets trapped by an irresponsible semi-boyfriend into delivering a mysterious attaché case to an ominous Mr. Jang (Min-sik Choi of Park Chan-wook's cult classic Oldboy). They may be as irrelevant ultimately as the lecture hall scenes, but the weird cut-ins of images of big cats catching prey spliced along with the sequence when the heavies are moving in on Scarlett Johansson seem bold, beautiful, and fun, a reminder that Luc Besson began with a film-schoolish and very strange, arty sci-fi film, Le Dernier Combat (The Last Battle), dialogue-free, in black and white, and described as "engrossing" by Janet Maslin, then (1984) film critic of the NY Times.

Walter Chaw had a fun review of Lucy last week, when the movie opened: he demolishes it but likes things about it -- and refers to Transcendence, whose premise is similar. Chaw notes in its favor Lucy's being "a breezy 88 minutes." It may be short because it has a premise that self-destructs. The protagonist, whose name links with that of the earliest hominoid. This is a fact that the wildly ambitious screenplay does not fail to exploit in a final time-travel tableau with a clichéd echo of Michelangelo's endlessly referenced God-to-Man touch-off on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. It's highest-evolved meets, well, least evolved, I guess, because the new contemporary Lucy is the ultimate human, who has achieved 100% of her mental capacity, and thus can do, it seems, anything. And it all started with being a surgical drug mule whose surgery went wrong.

The real clone of this plotline, though it's modest by comparison in both concept and budget, is Neil Burger's Limitless, which starred Bradley Cooper as a man who takes "mysterious" pills that, yes, bring up his accessed brain capacity to 100% of potential. But Cooper's character doesn't want to rule the world, be everywhere, and master all knowledge. He just goes from an unpromising life as a struggling writer to being a top analyst on Wall Street capable of cornering the market. That's what people do, hey. As the first name-last name Professor Norman (Freeman) tells us, he doesn't think humans are yet ready for 100% access to their brain capacity. Neither, evidently, was Luc Besson, who penned this opus as well as directed it.

The one who is ready is Scarlett Johansson. A French writer, enthusing about this movie, calls her "sulfurous." I guess that means sultry and explosive. She is. However, Lucy has been completely ignored by most of the important French critics, and praised very wanly by the lesser Parisian scribes who've spoken of it. Ms. Johansson has tried her hand at being a computer voice (Her) and an avenging alien (Under the Skin) lately. Now she's shown she can give Angelina Jolie (see Wanted; Salt) a run for her money. But I'm wishing she'd play a drawing-room comedy again, as she did in Vicky Christina Barcelona. Those can be a challenge too.

Lucy, 88 mins., opened in the US 25 July 2014.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.