The previews to Lucy looked rather intriguing
and you can’t go wrong with Scarlett Johansson and Morgan Freeman. Right?
Well…let’s just say they were fine but the movie was different. As in, we
walked out after final credits and said, “That was weird.” I can’t put my
finger on what went wrong, but I was never fully engaged in the flick. The
director, Luc Besson, does great action sequences, and this wasn’t a cheap
film. But….it was just okay.
My husband said that maybe it had too many big ideas.
Lucy was trying to make us think about human capability and our use of
brain cells and also the concept of time. That’s a lot of material to cover.
The movie starts with a sequence showing cells splitting and
leads to the ape named Lucy – one of our ancestors. Then we leap to Scarlett’s
Lucy hanging out in Asia. She gets coerced into carrying a brief case into a
fancy high rise to give to a man. Well, this goes horribly wrong. The case has
some drug that accelerates brain capacity. Lucy is injected with a baggie of
this for smuggling. The bag leaks and she’s going crazy with intense ability to
hear, see, absorb, and comprehend everything in the world.
She looks up Morgan Freeman (playing a
professor/researcher/doctor) who is the specialist in the brain cell field.
He’s fascinated by her story and she shows up to meet him and be studied.
However, she only has 24 hours to live because everything in her has sped up to
warp speed. Meanwhile, the Asian men are after her to reclaim their prize. So,
it’s a race against time. It’s Lucy explaining how she’s thinking and trying to
understand what this means. The researchers stand around befuddled as they try
to figure out what questions to ask. Are you confused yet? And/or do you care
about Lucy?
