Lucy (2014)

What the hell is this movie?

Lucy begins with Scarlett Johansson in Taiwan. She plays a character named Lucy (I'm going to take this slow, because this movie is whacked out). She says to a guy that is supposed to be her boyfriend that she is a "student." I don't know what language(s) might be spoken over in Taiwan, but based on how she dresses, I'm assuming "student" translates to "prostitute" in at least all of them.

Anyway, her "boyfriend" has to deliver a suspicious locked briefcase to somebody in an office building. He doesn't want to do it himself because they will recognize him, so he forces her to do it instead by handcuffing the briefcase to her wrist and telling her that only the guy in the building has the key. Girls always go for the asshole types.

Actually, wait--the movie starts earlier than that, with a scene of an ape/hominid thing drinking out of a stream in the primeval wilderness. Scarlett Johansson asks me how far humanity has come/what we've made of ourselves/pretentious psuedo-philosophically deep question. The next shots are of skyscrapers and modern cities and the like. I can't tell if I'm supposed to be appalled at what we've done with the world, or impressed that we've come so far. I'm not sure the movie knows either, but we'll get there.

Back to the briefcase scene. Lucy Johansson is pissed, but now she has to go inside, even though she's pretty sure the whole operation is illegal and didn't want to do it even when her boyfriend offered her half of the $1000 he would get for dropping it off. I would have gone straight to the police and dumped the boyfriend's ass, but girls always like the asshole types.

Actually, wait--I'm getting ahead of myself again. While Scarlett Lucy is talking to her boyfriend and he's trying to get her to deliver the briefcase, we briefly cut to a shot of a mouse heading toward a mouse trap. Do you get it? (SPOILER: The trap is the producer's pocket and the mouse is your money.)

Anyway.

She goes up to the reception desk all nervous-like and says she's there to drop off the briefcase. The guy at the desk asks her what her name is and she says "Lucy." Do you get it? (SPOILER: Her name is "Lucy".)

Oh, wait, no, she actually says "Richard." Because "Richard" is the name of her "boyfriend" in this "movie." The guy gives her a look and starts to ask her more questions, like what's in the briefcase, but she doesn't know and just wants to get out of the theater 'cause this movie sucks already--er, I mean, just wants to get rid of the briefcase, 'cause it's chafing her wrist something awful. The guy on the other end of the line tells the receptionist to tell Lucy to wait there. She asks if she can go sit down, but the guy says the other guy said to wait right there. He sounds like an asshole, so she'll probably like him.

Suddenly, her boyfriend, the one who didn't want to be recognized and who has literally been standing right outside the glass doors in plain view this whole time, gets shot. The movie tries to stop us from asking logical questions like "Who shot him?" or "Why did they shoot him?" or "Is the movie going to be this disjointed the entire way through?" (SPOILER: Yes) by distracting us with some armed guys running through the lobby and grabbing Lucy and taking her into the elevator. (I have to mention that the preceding scene is peppered with cutaway shots of cheetahs stalking antelope. That's not some kind of joke, it actually happens. In the movie.)

You've probably seen the trailers for this movie already. You can probably figure out that the briefcase holds bags filled with a blue drug (they keep referring to it as a powder, even though it looks more like aquarium gravel), and that one of them gets implanted in her abdomen, breaks open, and gives her superpowers. You probably also know that it works by allowing her to access the 90% of her brain that according to the movie is just dead weight for normal people (SPOILER: This movie is not remotely based on real life).

What you might not know is that this movie actually manages to make even less sense than the trailers imply. Oldboy from Oldboy plays what passes for the film's villain, the cartoonish drug lord who had the drugs implanted, not only in her, but in three men, to transport the drug (called CPH4) to different countries via commercial plane travel.

Already, I have an infinite number of questions.

-Why did they choose Lucy? They literally just met her--she was just some girl who walked in with the briefcase of CPH4 or whatever, and she clearly was not willing to just go along with things. Doesn't seem like a smart business decision to offer a job to someone you've just met, then hire them even though they say "no." True, she was too stupid to go to the police earlier, but having a briefcase handcuffed to your wrist isn't the same as being cut open and having illegal drugs stuffed into you.

-Why did her boyfriend have the briefcase in the first place? He said he had dropped stuff off there before, but they acted like the CPH4 in the briefcase was all they had. Did he drop off other things before? Pizzas maybe? Why would he be worried about them recognizing him? Wasn't he hired to do that? Maybe he forgot to say 'no mushrooms' the last time and he knows they were pissed, I dunno.

-What were the men in the office doing when they brought Lucy up? We saw some dead/dying people bloodying up the carpet, what was up with that? (I know it's supposed to set a tense atmosphere, but even in context it was more goofy and ridiculous than foreboding.)

-Why did they kill Richard, her boyfriend?

-Why was he dressed like a cowboy? What that supposed to be his disguise? Wouldn't that just make him more conspicuous? 

-Did including a cowboy give the movie more international appeal? Are cowboys a big deal in Taiwan?

-What did Lucy ever see in him in the first place? Why do girls always go for the asshole types?

These aren't all plot holes, but they are still important questions.

To make things even more ridiculous, when they give Lucy the code to open the case, they all stand back behind riot shields before she opens it. They say they don't know what Richard might have done to it. Why would they suspect something? He said they'd hired him to drop stuff off before. How did it get into his hands if they don't trust him? Or are they just worried he forgot to say 'no mushrooms' again?

So this movie sounds goofy as hell already, I know, but what makes it really strange is that everything up to this point feels like it was shot in a very thoughtful way. Every shot feels calculated, nothing feels arbitrary. It all looks so pretty and purposeful, if you were to walk in on any of these scenes thinking the reason nothing made sense was because it was already half over, you might accidentally get the impression that you were watching a real movie.

Anyway, Lucy opens the case, and they test the contents by bringing out a dazed, barely conscious guy from a back room and having him snort some of the drugs. They have to slap him a bunch of times to keep him awake. Again, doesn't seem like a good judge, but when he starts laughing they decide it passed the test. That must have been how they reviewed the script.

That's where they ask Lucy if she wants a job, then knock her out when she says "no." When she wakes up, one of the bags of drugs is in her abdomen, and they give her and the other three guys with drugs in them their passports. The other three guys look pretty calm, so I assumed they were willing mules at first, but then they were told that their families would be killed if they went to the police or anything like that. Could they really not find anyone who would be willing to transport the drugs for money? And I still don't see how that threat applies to Lucy, as they don't know anything about her at all.

They lock her up (I guess they're waiting for a plane, I don't know), and her guards start trying to mess with her. She bites one of them, so he starts kicking her in the stomach. They leave her on the floor, and colorful CGI shows us the drugs leaking out of the bag and getting into her system. She starts spasming up the wall and onto the ceiling (that's not some kind of typo, it's literally what happens).

If it feels like this review is jumping around all over the place, it's because this movie is so incoherent that it's impossible to remember exactly what happens when, but either here or at some other completely random point earlier, the movie jumps sideways into a lecture hall filled with the most attentive students I've ever seen. You know those older people you get in a lot of college classes? The ones who make you feel like an asshole because they seem to be paying such close attention to the instructor while you're just sitting there drawing stick figures performing obscene acts on each other in an attempt to stay awake, until you hear them ask a question so stupid you realize they probably don't even know what class they are in in the first place? That's what all the people in this class look like.

The class is being taught by Professor Morgan Freeman (played by actor Morgan Freeman). I can't think of a lazier way of both delivering exposition and trying to legitimize the stupid premise of your movie than by having freaking Morgan Freeman literally tell an audience of morons what the movie is about.

Again, I'm sure you know what the movie is about because Morgan Freeman told you in the trailers, but what he tells his students is that humans can only access 10% of their brains' capacity. He goes so far as to say that dolphins are the only animals that can go farther--up to 20%. I guess that explains those super-advanced cities they keep finding out in the ocean. Oh, wait, no, it's supposed to explain how they can use echolocation. I'm not sure how that applies to other whales, bats, etc. At least he doesn't try to suggest that dolphins figured out how to develop echolocation themselves. 

He does, however, go so far as to say, in relation to dolphins naturally developing echolocation and humans inventing sonar: "This is the crucial part of our philosophical reflection we have today. Can we therefore conclude that humans are concerned more with having...than being?" The class gasps as if this is some kind of revelatory or eye-opening suggestion, and unfortunately I can imagine the more brain-dead people in the audience doing the same.

This movie would embarrass even James Cameron in how far it goes with shameless attempts at audience manipulation. Movies as a storytelling form depend on manipulating their audience, yes, but well made movies will do so in such a way that you are unaware that you are being manipulated even while it's happening. Cameron, as an example, doesn't usually succeed at that, especially in his newer films--the elements that Cameron uses to make the audience feel a certain way, elements that would normally be obscured in other movies, are right out in plain sight in things like Avatar.

But at least in Cameron's case, we can tell what we are supposed to feel. It doesn't work--the movie telling you to be scared or angry isn't the same as the movie doing something to make you feel scared or angry--but you can tell what he's going for because he hammers it into your skull. In this movie, even the audience cues don't make any sense. We as the audience are in the same place as the students in the class, listening to Morgan Freeman deliver exposition. As such, assuming the movie had pulled us in like a good movie would do, we should be having the same reaction as his students. But when everything he says is so stupid that it just makes us laugh, the movie becomes even more absurd by blatantly trying to give us the impression that it is "deep," from the opening question about what we've done with life on Earth, to having the class react in such a way to the drivel coming out of Morgan Freeman's mouth. In a parody it might work, but this is supposed to be a real part of the movie.

It should also be noted that while Morgan Freeman is often hired because of the authoritative way he speaks/narrates, a lot of his lines here, including those above, feel awkward, as if they recorded him reading the script for the first time as he wondered whether this would finally be the role he would say 'no' to.

The movie actually cuts to the class a few times, and one of those scenes contains my favorite moment: Morgan Freeman is jabbering on, and there is a shot of a bunch of the students typing furiously on their laptops. What are they typing? Morgan Freeman isn't talking very quickly, and he's not saying much to begin with. It might not sound funny reading about it, but I laughed out loud in the theater.

Nothing Morgan Freeman says ever makes any sense. As the movie goes on, he speculates: What would happen if a person could access more than 10% of their brain's capacity? (Side note: I think the word they mean to use is 'capability'; 'capacity' is how much it could hold, like memory, whereas 'capability' is how much it could do.) Morgan Freeman gives one of his patented Knowing LooksTM and says something about gaining access to and control over one's physical self at 20%. Don't we already have that at our supposed 10%? I think he means absolute control over ourselves down our very cells, but if dolphins are already at 20%...screw it, I don't know.

At that point, a kid raises his hand and asks (in English so broken that I'm not sure the actor had any idea what the words meant), whether there is any scientific evidence behind what he is saying, or if it's all bullshit. I don't know why they would have someone actually ask that in a movie that is clearly pulling everything out of its ass, but I like the fact that Morgan Freeman just kind of says, "Wellllllll, no....." That's where I would have walked out of that class and transferred to a different school.

As if that wasn't enough, he goes on about how nobody believed Darwin at first, and that, "It's up to us to push the rules and laws and go from 'evolution' to 'revolution.'" Everyone in the class laughs, and everyone in the audience groans. I'm not even going to go into that one, but in the spirit of the movie's lack of coherency, let me arbitrarily choose this moment to mention that the Morgan Freeman lecture scenes are particularly infested with stock footage of planes/animals mating and giving birth/storms/random-ass shit.

Morgan Freeman continues, saying that humans would gain control of others at 40%, then control of matter (are people not made of matter in this movie?). He hesitates to go farther, saying that that would be venturing into science fiction, a statement that seems to demonstrate an intense lack of understanding of science as a very concept.

Annnnnnnyway--back to Lucy.

The screen goes to black with a big "20%" in white, and when she recovers from her episode and sits back up in her chair, a series of shots of her sitting really still show us how emotionless she has become. A guard comes in for some sexytime, and she beats him up and takes his gun. She walks out, shoots all the others eating their lunch...and then adds insult to murder by eating all their sandwiches. We're assaulted by jump cuts in the middle of the shot where she drinks a glass of water, another manipulation tactic of sorts to make us automatically think she is drinking a lot. The glass is pretty small, so it ends up being unintentionally funny instead. Also, the scene seems to exist to show us that her metabolism has increased, which makes sense I guess...?...but we never see it referenced again in the entire movie, so I don't know. 

There's another moment of unintentional humor when she goes up to two guys outside, shoots one in the leg, and forces the other one to drive her to the hospital. As they are about to drive away, subtitles for the guy who got shot come up on the screen, reading simply, "My leg." Subtitles will show up a lot more in the movie, but that's the first time they've appeared so far. We already saw him get shot, is it really that important that we know exactly what he is saying?

Being at 20% somehow let's Lucy translate the signs in the hospital that are in Chinese. She heads into a surgery room and shoots the guy on the operating table, telling the doctors they couldn't save him anyway. Apparently, going to 20% automatically makes you a medical expert too.

As absurd as the rest of the movie has been, that's where it really pushes itself over the line. Let's say we can accept that idea that we only use 10% of our brains for the sake of the movie. Let's say we can also accept that nothing relating to the criminals makes any sense because we simply don't know all the information relating to them. Granted, that would still be a problem with the movie not giving us enough information, but let's pretend we can still let it slide. The big logic problem comes when the movie expects us to believe that Lucy simply *knows* how to read Chinese because she can "access more of her brain's capacity." Sure, maybe she could learn it faster and retain it better, but how does she just *know* it? The same goes for interpreting the X-rays/MRIs of the patient. Just because she is more intelligent or perceptive doesn't mean she has the relevant information and knowledge she would need to do those things. Even in the context of the movie, it makes no sense.

Lucy gets on the table and tells the doctors at gunpoint to remove the rest of the drugs from her abdomen. She then asks if they mind that she makes a call on her cell while they work.

She calls her mom, who we only hear (and only in this one scene), but who still manages to compete with some of the students in the lecture hall for being the worst actor in the movie. The entire conversation is again unintentionally funny. Lucy talks about being able to feel everything and remember everything, including the taste of her mother's milk. She starts to tear up and tells her mother that she loves her. She later mentions that she no longer has any emotions, which from how she was acting seems to have been the case already, so having her cry here doesn't make much sense.

We already know the rest of the movie won't make much sense either, so I'll just cover the highlights, such as they are:

-When Lucy gets to Oldboy, she looks into his memory to find out where the other drug mules are going. We see her looking at things from his point of view, but she then seems to use his memories to access the memories of everyone else at the scene in his memory to get different perspectives until she can clearly see the passports. What???

-Lucy contacts a French cop to help her get the rest of the drugs. She needs the rest of the drugs because her body is breaking down--even though she supposedly has complete control over it, and by this point can apparently manipulate electromagnetic waves, and even type on two laptops at once! By the way, while she's using them the laptop screens creatively look like the Matrix screens. 

-The first scene with her using a computer had her typing nonstop and windows popping up all over the screen. Not only is it ridiculous because of how advanced of a computer it would have to be to keep up with what she is supposedly doing, but in the same scene she contacts Professor Morgan Freeman and proves herself to him by making herself show up on his TV, phone, computer. The movie is so inconsistent as to how powerful she is at any given moment (she is still supposed to be at 20% here).

-When Lucy sees a news report about her, she makes her hair change so she will look different...but she does it in the middle of a crowded airport. Besides, wouldn't changing her face make more sense? I know this is a movie with a marketable actress, but still.

-While Lucy is on a plane headed for Morgan Freeman's place (typing away on those two laptops) her body finally starts to break down. Again, she seems to have complete control over herself and tons of other superhuman abilities (she's now at 40%). Why can't she figure out a way to stop it? She spits out teeth, then her hand starts dissolving Super Mario Bros.-style, and she rushes into the bathroom. She has a Poltergeist moment in the mirror before scarfing down the rest of the drugs and, uh, turning into light...yeah.

-What if someone else were to breathe in parts of her that dissolved on the plane? Would they gain nonsensical abilities too? She probably dropped a bunch of the drugs on the floor of the bathroom, what if someone got into that? How did Oldboy and the others not know that the drug could do that to people? If he wanted to fix everything, why didn't he just have one of his own men take some of the drug and do it for him? Seriously, what would be the next step of the story? Would we have multiple CPH4 users fighting each other on a cosmic scale?

-Once the other mules are detained, Oldboy sends his men after them. As Lucy's abilities keep increasing, the threat of Oldboy and his men lessens and lessens. Every time Lucy encounters an obstacle, she takes it out really easily. Basically, there is no conflict in the movie. She has to get to the rest of the drugs before she dies, but she can do anything, so of course she's going to get to them.

-In an attempt to pretend there is conflict, this movie contains possibly the most ridiculous car chase in history. It is a one-car chase, where no one is chasing the car. Lucy is racing to get to Oldboy and the drugs once they get them back from the police, so she drives like a maniac through the streets of Paris, causing countless accidents and probably lots of deaths. Why couldn't she just levitate over the traffic? Why couldn't she just disable all the other cars electronically? When the car does gain pursuers in the form of police cars, she makes poles sink down into the sidewalk and reemerge in the middle of the road to stop them. Why? She could just make them stop in place. I don't know, fuck this movie. 

-She keeps the French cop around for no logical reason in the context of the movie. At one point he even says something like "Why am I still here?" She has some dumb line about it being so she could remember, but it's really because the audience needs to feel that something is at stake. It's no surprise that the movie does nothing to make us care about French cop guy, but we're supposed to anyway. He is still mortal, so he is someone that Oldboy can get to. There is even a big shootout toward the end between the cops and the bad guys, but we don't care because we know Lucy could stop it in an instant. The fact that she doesn't just stop it makes no sense either.

-The movie as a whole tries to pretend it's an action movie, but again, there is no conflict. Oldboy and his men should know they can't stop her, but they keep trying to anyway. And not even just by shooting her from a distance, but sometimes by trying to fight her hand-to-hand. Why? She could incapacitate them at any time, but she keeps letting them go. Why? She kills all the ones that she encounters after first gaining her abilities, but stops once she gets to Oldboy himself, and let's him go. Why? During the "car chase," she even says to the French cop, "We never really die?" Really? Why should I care then? Fuck this movie.

-Lucy finally gets to Morgan Freeman, who has assembled a small group of scientists. Believe it or don't, the movie manages to become even more pretentious toward the end. She says a bunch of shit that makes even less sense than anything that has come before. It's supposed to sound meaningful and thought provoking, but she basically spouts off random things that don't relate to each other, like "there are no numbers or letters, we created them to give us a reference," or something like that, which is kind of a true statement for once, I guess, but not one that has any deeper meaning. It's like something a stoned 12 year old would say.

-Lucy takes the rest of the CPH4 and hits 70%. I groaned audibly as I wondered how I would make it through the last 30%. Thankfully, the last 30% passes pretty quickly.

-There's a goofy looking dinosaur somewhere in there that looks like it stepped out of a freaking cartoon. I don't know.

-Then she turns into--I shit you not--a fucking computer! I can hear you laughing, but I swear it's the truth! She wants to pass her knowledge on to Morgan Freeman, so she turns into a black, fantasy castle-looking computer with a USB flash drive he can pull out. The drive has stars greenscreened onto it, so you know it's not just a normal flash drive. I'm not kidding, I swear! When he pulls out the flash drive, the computer dissolves into nothing.

-The French cop guy shoots Oldboy (SPOILER) and asks where Lucy went. He gets a message on his phone saying "I AM EVERYWHERE." She says something like, "You've been given life; now you know what to do with it." If she means making completely illogical decisions all of the time, then I guess most of humanity is already on the right path.

THE END

Phew, okay. So that was terrible, but at least it's over.

I've heard of customers at the theater where I work coming out of this movie and saying it was "deep," and "good." I heard about one guy saying it was one of the best scifi movies of the last several years. It really feels like a 2001: A Space Odyssey for dumb people. 2001 was pretentious enough, but at least it was a real movie. This movie even paralleled the beginning of that one with the hominids, and the ending with the Star Child. There was even some stuff that looked like going through the Star Gate before Lucy turns into a computer (that really happens, I swear on your mother's life).

Luc Besson wrote, directed, and even edited this monstrosity. I haven't seen enough of his movies to really make an informed analysis on how this fits into his filmography. I can say that the big hallway shootout toward the end was reminiscent of the shootout toward the end of Leon, aka The Professional, only without any weight to it whatsoever. It's also safe to say that Besson is not gay, looking at all the movies he does with female protagonists, and how he shoots them. After watching this movie, I feel like Scarlett Johansson's face is imprinted on my brain. I think it's in the 90% I don't use, though.

We've already established that this is just another paycheck for Morgan Freeman. Johansson actually puts some effort into this one for some reason, but she just doesn't have what it takes to sell a lot of it. She can cry and act worried, but we never get a sense of it being anything more than acting. At least she doesn't have to do anything for most of the movie because the script conveniently calls for her not to show emotion.

This movie is crap. Yes, the trailers told me it would be, but I expected enjoyable crap. Instead, I found myself board and angry. Even my occasional spurts of laughter were tempered by my anticipation of the movie being over. It's less than 90 minutes long, and I still barely made it through without falling asleep. If you're like me, everything you heard about it made it sound so ridiculous you just had to watch it to see if it was all true. Trust me, it's not worth it. As one of the employees at my theater said, "I saw it for free and still wanted a refund."

Avoid this movie at all costs. If anyone recommends it to you, ask them why they liked it. If they say it's because it was "deep," ask them to elaborate. Knowing what you do after reading this, you're sure to get more enjoyment out of whatever they say to you than you would from actually watching the movie.