Scarlett Johansson is Lucy
“LUCY” My rating: B- (Opening wide on July 25)
90 minutes | MPAA rating: R
We’ve been repeatedly told that human beings coast by using only 10 percent of our brainpower.
What happens when we kick that statistic up to 20 percent, 50 percent — even 100 percent — is illustrated in “Lucy,” director Luc Besson’s giddy, goofy and slickly made sci-fi thriller.
Our titular heroine (Scarlett Johansson) is a young woman studying in Taiwan — though she apparently spends more time partying than cracking books. In the film’s opening moments she is coerced by a former boyfriend into delivering a
Min-sik Choi
briefcase to a high-rise office building. There she finds herself in the clutches of a venal gangster, Jang (Min-sik Choi, the scary/compelling star of “Old Boy” and “I Saw the Devil”), who has a plan to use Lucy and three other kidnapped individuals to smuggle a new superdrug into Europe and the U.S.
The ghastly plan calls for large plastic pouches of the drug CPH-4 to be sewn into the abdomens of the unwilling mules. Failure to complete the mission will mean reprisals against the couriers’ families.
Before she can board a plane, though, the bag in Lucy’s tummy ruptures, flooding her system with the potent pharmaceutical and kicking her brain into overdrive. Not only are her thinking processes given a jump start, but she gains superhuman hand-eye coordination, X-ray vision (a tree comes alive with flowing, glowing dots of energy) and, eventually, control of time and space.
“I feel everything.” she says. “Space, air, vibrations, people…I can feel gravity, the rotation of the Earth.”
All this is presented in a breathless visual style that feels not unlike the mind-blowing head journey that concluded Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” — although Besson delivers his trip at Mach speed. Creative visual effects depict the changes in Lucy’s body at the cellular level — and in a couple of gloriously oddball sequences we meet a hairy man-ape in the Pleistocene. Besson also likes to drop in snippets of cheetahs hunting gazelles to suggest that Lucy is now the top predator in her world.
Morgan FreemanThough she d
Happily, Besson doesn’t take himself too seriously. For all the gore and gruesomeness, “Lucy” has a sense of humor.
Gradually Lucy loses most of her human feelings — pain, desire, emotion. All except revenge — she’s determined to bring down that bastard Jang.
Along the way she is abetted by a neuroscientist (Morgan Freeman) and a French cop (Amr Waked).
Besson — who has a long history of being drawn to kick-ass heroines (“La Femme Nikita,” “Leon: The Professional,” “The Fifth Element,” “The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc”) draws inspiration from films like “The Matrix” (bullet-dodging gun battles) and “Kill Bill” (one woman brawling with an army of Asian thugs).
Beyond the sheer enthusiasm of Besson’s vision, “Lucy” benefits from yet another great Johansson performance. When we first meet Lucy she’s just a party girl. Then she’s a terrorized victim. And slowly she becomes, well, god-like. Johansson nicely navigates these heady changes.
“Lucy” would make a heck of a double feature with “Under the Skin,” in which Johansson played a low-emotion serial killer from another planet. That film was slow and deliberate — just the opposite of Besson’s speed-freak approach — but both pictures give this actress an opportunity to create out-there characters that, yes, get under your skin.
| Robert W. Butler
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