Pas de baisers pour Besson.....

Rating: 7/10 (19 January 2015)

WARNING: DON'T read this review if you have not seen Luc Besson's LUCY and still want to without preconceptions.
I saw LUCY, directed by Luc Besson, last night. I saw it so now you don't need to. It's not just that it's a bad film, it's that if you've seen the trailer, you've pretty much seen the film. On top of that Besson wants to have his auteur cake and mange it.
He sticks in vaguely appropriate stock footage when hammering home some point or other as though we can't understand his great artistic vision and winds up making a high-budget philosophy/film studies student graduation film.
At the other extreme he is so in thrall to lazy American action tropes ie huge gun fights and gigantically destructive car chases it comes across like a chic Parisien trying to pass himself off as an American in Paris. "Ca va, baby? Je suis "Hank" Besson".
These Yank tropes fill in all the bits between the French philosophising and are polyfilla in place of a solid plot. When in doubt have lots of bullets flying around.
Honestly, you could tell the whole story in 15 minutes but Besson spends the first 15 minutes just setting up the delivery of a briefcase!
As for Morgan Freeman, he's just there to be the "voice of god as infodump" again and has absolutely nothing to do with the outcome of the plot. He just looks on in awe as Scarlett Johansson becomes God, basically. Presumably, while he spent weeks looking at a ping pong ball on a stick, he was actually thinking about lunch in the same way that Johansson thinks showing intelligence lies in not looking people in the face.
Most seriously, he delivers the "people use only 10% of their brain" premise as though it's a real thing while playing the world's expert on evolution. No, that's a myth. We use all our brains all the time. I suspect using 100% might be having an epileptic fit but, however it is, the 10% brain trope is appallingly bad science. If you imagine Freeman as a Creationist seriously arguing the world is 6000 years old as cutting-edge science you'd get a whiff of how bad this pseudoscience is.
All I can say in its favour is that Johannsson is mesmerising, as always, and she does at least take it seriously. It looks good on the SFX side and is tres chic, as you'd expect from Besson.
But, dear God, Besson, get a real writer in. Your self-penned juvenile comic book story sensibility just isn't cutting it in a world that has people like Chris Nolan who did your finale in INTERSTELLAR and did it better. Actually so did Stanley Kubrick, in 2001.