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.