Lucy

Lucy is a standard superhero origin film, only with the impression it’s something much cleverer and more sophisticated. It’s sadly wrong and really rather charmless, but there’s at least some fun wish-fulfilment one-person-takes-on-the-mafia-and-wins action sequences.

Based on the old and daft urban myth that we only use 10% of our brains, it follows an unwitting young woman named Lucy who while in Taiwan whose boyfriend sends her into a hotel to act as a drug mule for the Korean mafia. She ends up with a large quantity of an experimental drug sewn into her abdomen, and when a rapey criminal kicks her in the stomach, the drug leaks out. It’s a super stem cell-like magic chemical that in an origin story that would fit in beside any of Stan Lee’s most absurd efforts, it gives her superpowers.

Scarlett Johansson’s performance here is praised, but essentially after the opening scenes she can stop acting and become robotic. She gains absurd knowledge and telekinetic powers, flies to Paris to get the rest of the drug from the other drug mules, defeats the evil mob boss and his cronies and ascends to a higher plane. However, she leaves behind a USB drive that sparkles mysteriously so that Morgan Freeman – the scientist who predicted what would happen when the brain exceeds its ‘usual’ 10% - may receive her godly knowledge and enrich mankind.

The film is rather pretentious, and Luc Besson makes it rather pretentiously – especially with his annoying interpolations of archive footage, mostly of nature documentaries. For someone whose big hit Leon was about humanising a figure difficult to see as having humanity, I’m surprised he’d see the merits of a story that effectively takes a human character and systematically removes that humanity. 

Sin City 2: A Dame to Kill For

Though it was intentionally lowbrow, the original Sin City made an impact. It had two things this film did not: firstly, the surprising novelty of a film intentionally made to look like a noir comic, Frank Miller style. Secondly, variety. It goes the same way as the 300 sequel – it lacks the same impact in stylistic terms, being a sequel, and suffers from much duller writing and far less engaging characters. I’m with the multitude of critics who have expressed surprise that this film, with all its ultraviolence and nudity and explosions is so very dull. It simply isn’t as fun as the first film. Not even close.

This film largely revolves around how evil Sin City’s senator is, and the various people who hate him. Joseph Gordon Levett has an abortive storyline made just to push home how nasty he is, where the only surprise is that his story goes in the most obvious way possible, rather than him revealing some greater plan. Otherwise, Bruce Willis’ ghost looms over his wife, who wants revenge for her husband being driven to suicide, and goes from stripper to badass with the help of the film’s real hero, tough-as-nails righteous psycho Marv, who we’re supposed to cheer for as he brutally kills four nasty rich kids who were themselves reprehensible murderers. Marv is also the muscle-for-hire in the film’s other main story, in which a tortured photographer is manipulated by his ex into killing her new husband, despite her incredibly strong manservant. Perhaps the most interesting thing to come out of the film is the potential debate over whether Eva Green’s character in her classic femme fatale exploitation role is a sexualised, abused product of the Hollywood system playing a hackneyed, un-PC character type and getting naked for the purposes of the male gaze, or whether in being the real manipulator who uses her body as she wishes and is in fact the rapist of the piece, is a powerful symbol of empowered womanhood.

Otherwise, it doesn’t look as startling as before, and the token Asian girl with the katana’s violent parts just lack any kind of visceral impact. It seems like the first film showed all the best tricks, and nothing is really left here, so they’re going through the motions with the stylised look. Nothing seems daring or innovative, which is a real problem here. Disappointing.