Lucy

He he he he he hell no.

This is a ROUGH movie. And I'm really sorry to say that because this had MASSIVE potential right out of the gate.

The first 15-20 minutes of this movie are really strong. It's well paced, it's upbeat, it's building tension, Scarlett Johansson's boyfriend drags her into a mob exchange, he gets shot, turns out the package she's handcuffed to might be a bomb, turns out it's not, it's a new superdrug, and they knock her out, cut her open, and turn her into a drug mule.

Following an altercation with a mob member which splits the package inside her and drops all that superdrug into her system she suddenly becomes Badass #1, ready to kick some ass, take some names, chew some bubblegum, and get revenge before the high ends and the shock kills her.

Amidst it all we have a collection of brief but inventive intercuts that draw parallels to what we're seeing go down alongside tangentially related events in nature.

Sounds like a fairly reasonable setup for some creative over-the-top action right?


Well, let's start with small issues: The acting is pretty weak.

Now, I know I'm not prone to speaking much on the topic of acting or even ACTORS in the movies I watch, but these two issues really stood out to me:

Firstly: Morgan Freeman is wasted. I know he's a good actor, I've seen him do it, but he brings absolutely nothing interesting to this role, and really what can he do when all he's expected to do is to parrot exposition and look as perplexed as I was when they turned that 20%-of-the-brain crap on full blast? He's a boring character and he could have been played and neglected by easily as anyone else.

Secondly: Scarlett Johansson is wasted. All the way up to the drug trip she's a pretty wracked girl and I totally buy her justified panic. EXCEPT that one moment where that one guy gets shot in front of her. I swear she was about to burst out laughing (why'd they keep that take?). But MOSTLY she's plays out her emotions well.

As soon as she hits that drug trip mode though she immediately falls into that cliche where the more intelligent and enlightened you are, the less you are able to emote because to be human is to be fallible and to be superhuman is to bore me to tears.

A couple other small issues would include awkward dialog and... other stuff, look, they're not my main concern.

My main concern is the scary blackhole of a plot and how this movie manages to excel at both skeeving me out and ****in' DESTROYING my suspension of disbelief.

The movie is REALLY uncomfortable to watch. I said The Stuff was gross, but this is an entirely different level of gross.

We see multiple animals having sex.
We see Scarlet's stomach cut open.
We see multiple animals graphically giving birth.
We see Scarlet repeatedly kicked in her bleeding stomach wound.
We see an antelope get run down by a cheetah (I always want to punch that camerman).
And we see Scalet's face literally melt off.

WOW. Not what I was expecting. Nor is it what I wanted.


Let's interrupt this negativity for a moment with something positive:

I almost didn't recognize the CG.


Okay, back to the crap.

Obviously, the biggest issue this movie suffers from though, and is obviously the biggest reason people are split on it, is that it goes to extraordinary lengths to ruin your immersion.

Morgan Freeman gives a speech about the hypothetical possibilities of using more than the mere 10% of our brains we use (which is a debatable claim to begin with) and points towards the dolphin as an example (I'll paraphrase):

Okay, fine, I'll extend my suspension of disbelief far enough to accept that dolphins have echolocation purely because they can use 20% of their brains. I'm going to just take all of that extremely dubious premise at face value. FINE. Cool. Whatever. So what does that mean? When Scarlett reaches 20% she'll get a personal sonar? Better reaction time? Powerful calculation skills?

No. She can levitate people.


Seriously. She becomes a ******* demi-god. She gains literal omniscience (and I mean LITERAL OMNISCIENCE), can flip cars with her mind, transmit her image to any screen, and shatter suspension of disbelief with every scene she's in.

She's super smart so she's a super fast typer, right? Well apparently her regular laptop is capable of opening, closing, and processing information in dozens of programs many times per second.

I've never seen any computer do that and this is set in modern day when both Youtube and Firefox are sluggish pieces of ****. Yeah right.

She's able to see and hear through walls and great distances, but she's unable to transmit her voice anywhere without a cell phone?

Why does she ever even get in a car? If she can levitate anything, why can't she just float her ass where she's going?

If she's so intelligent that she can see telephone data streams in the air, why does she need to physically move them around to find what she's looking for? Why is this there a literal user interface for her magic god powers?

Also why does she melt? She spits her teeth out, her skin dissolves away, and she explodes on a plane only to wake up perfectly fine elsewhere? WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT!?

Was it... uh.. her.. learning to teleport? Why did that require BODY HORROR?

You know, this whole movie's superpower excuse is paper-thin enough to begin with, why do you pack so many stones on the suspension-of-disbelief scale that it's collapsed three floors down beneath the table you set it on?

She walks into a room unarmed full of bad guys with guns and for a moment I think about that really cool action I was promised, but then she just walks forward monotonously as everyone around her just floats away. ANTICLIMAX.

And you know what dug into me harder than anything else in this movie? What happened NEXT:

PENIS. The answer is PENIS.


Final Verdict:

[Just... Bad]