Review: ‘Lucy’

There has been this idea floating around for a long time that we humans only use 10% of our brain’s power and capacity, effectively leaving so much potential and power untouched and unused, and of course it plays right into our own innate desire to see ourselves as the top of the food chain, the masters of the universe, the end all, be all of creation and/or evolution. Not only are we the best things to happen to this world, but we have so much more power to obtain, so much more to do, we can (and will!) be even better because goddammit we are humans and we have earned the right to rule all, even only utilizing a fraction of our brain.

Too bad it has been pretty thoroughly disproven that this particular idea of “brain capacity” and 10% usage is false and misinformed and just wrong.

But that did not stop writer/director Luc Besson from basing an entire movie on this one premise, plowing ahead with a bunch of stoner philosophy and a touch of science fiction in a little something he decided to call “Lucy.” In this movie, Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) is an American student in South Korea who likes to party, and that’s all the information given to us by the time she is quickly forced into a drug smuggling operation that involves an experimental drug being forcefully placed inside her body. And when the baggie containing the drugs start to leak inside of her, her cells are transformed and she starts using more and more of her brain, evolving into an emotionless person who can manipulate people, things, space, time and whatever else needs to be manipulated in order to move the story forward.

And do you see? Do you see how weird it is to watch a movie in which the central conceit is just so damn stupid and wrong? So the ole suspension of disbelief gets put to the test here for reals, and if you can get past this initial piece of idiocy, then you have a pretty decent movie with some fun ideas in it, something that is worth watching thanks to some cool scenes, a fairly wild ending, and a fully committed performance from Johansson. She totally goes all in with this movie, and really sells the initial dumb, party girl version of the character in the beginning of the movie because after the drugs kick in and she starts using more of her brain (ugh, so stupid), there is a real difference in her performance, as she becomes a totally different person, shedding who she once was very quickly, and allowing for her to really show some acting range, for which some people seemingly do not give her enough credit.

Also there’s Morgan Freeman as a professor who specializes in brain capacity (what a coincidence!) and whom Lucy contacts for…well, not for help, but for something. Actually, it is not really established why she needs to contact this guy who she even said herself has only come up with a rudimentary understanding of what the brain can do, but then again, she quickly gets to a point where she can do anything she wants and literally nothing can stand in her way, so why does she need anyone? And what is her ultimate goal? She says early on in the movie that she knows she only has a short time before her body gives out and she dies in the corporeal sense, so she’s trying to accomplish SOMETHING before she moves on to her next plane of existence, but what that goal might be is not clear at all.

There is also a car chase scene that is not really a chase but just Lucy driving a cop car really dangerously through traffic, so dangerously that A LOT of other cars end up crashing and flipping and just doing Michael Bay levels of ridiculous shit, all because Lucy is simply driving in the wrong direction. While decently shot and seemingly involving a good amount of actual stunt driving and real cars really getting crashed (which I will ALWAYS appreciate), this is possibly one of the most boring and least consequential “high speed driving” scenes I’ve ever seen.

So there is a lot of dumb, stupid, not well thought out stuff in “Lucy,” but there is also other stuff that I did think worked pretty well. Even though we’ve established that this movie is built on a dumb idea, Luc Besson does a smart thing by moving the momentum forward by showing us where Lucy’s brain usage is via huge white font on a black background, so the movie is punctuated with these title cards declaring that Lucy is at 20%, 40%, 60%, and so on, and this works because it is building to something, as we the audience can only become intrigued by what will happen when she eventually reaches 100%.

And without giving anything away, I didn’t know what to expect when she hit 100%, and when it eventually happened, I was very intrigued and interested by the idea they came up with, and it looks pretty weird and it was definitely something I did not expect and actually appreciated for its weirdness.

So the movie isn’t a total loss, and will actually provide some entertainment for people when they stumble upon it on television or spend minimal money to rent it on home video or stream it or whatever it is people do these days, but “Lucy” is also the kind of movie that wants to be more clever than it actually is. If “Lucy” had a brain, it was using less than 10% of it the whole time.