Lucy

Rated: R

        When the previews for Lucy came out I had no desire to see it. The premise (which I’ll get to in a moment) seemed rather dumb and farfetched at best. The problem for me was in the cover of the Blu Ray. It looked awful similar, while I was shopping for movies at Bull Moose Music in Portsmouth, to another Scarlett Johansson movie I did want to see. Granted, the colors on the box weren’t quite right, but I thought that  perhaps I was thinking of another movie entirely at the time, and so I brought Lucy home to watch by mistake. My husband was happy with this accident, since he did in fact want to see it, but me? Not so much.
 
        
Lucy is the story of an American party girl who gets mixed up into being a drug mule in Taipei. The drug dealers sew a large bag of a new synthetic drug, CPH4 into her stomach. Unbeknownst to them, the bag breaks, which causes bizarre and unrealistic side effects to Lucy, altering her forever.
 
        This movie, unlike its recent counter parts, only clocks in at a measly 88 minutes. Not that there’s anything wrong with a shorter movie, but it seems that writer/director Luc Besson had a hard time stretching the story to that length.
Lucy is peppered with scenes seemingly straight out of National Geographic, complete with the dawn of man and a cheetah pouncing on its prey. I think Besson was trying to add to the deeper meaning of the film by including all of these, but to me it seemed like mindless filler.
 
        This film had an even harder time making its overall story line believable, not to mention enjoyable. Morgan Freeman plays Professor Norman, who believes that humans only use 10% of their brains, and goes on at length describing what would happen if we used our whole brains, including the ability to control matter and time. This theory was proven to be rubbish long ago. We now know that we use our entire brains, just not all on cognitive function.
 
        There’s nothing wrong with a Sci-Fi movie, or any movie for that matter, taking giant leaps to (at least seem) believable. My problem with
Lucy lies in the assumption by Besson that everyone who watches this movie is stupid and that the only thing that matters in movie making is action, even if it’s at the expense of the plot line. And this plot line has more holes than Swiss cheese! Save your money, and sanity; avoid this if you can.

               
Lucy is rated R, was written and directed by Luc Besson and stars Scarlett Johansson and Morgan Freeman. It’s available now on Blu Ray, DVD and digital download.