You'll Love "Lucy!!!"

Rating: 9/10 (3 August 2014)

You'll love "Lucy." French filmmaker Luc Besson, who helmed "Le Femme Nikita," "Angel-A," and "Colombiana," takes the feminist-oriented action thriller to the next level. This outlandish but entertaining hokum chronicles the mutation of a young damsel-in-distress into an invincible dame with heretofore unheard of mental powers. Our provocative protagonist comes to rely more on her brains than her biology. Comparably, "Lucy" reminded me a little of the 2004 movie "Maria Full of Grace." Columbian drug dealers planted cocaine into the stomach of a teenage girl in "Maria Full of Grace" and used her to smuggle their narcotics into the United States. Happily, this savvy babe turned the tables on her captors! Similarly, our heroine in "Lucy" finds a bag of exotic synthetic drugs sew into her tummy and given a plane ticket for America. The last thing that her savagely coldblooded captors are prepared for is her unlikely reprisal. Lucy turns the tables on them in ways that not even she could have imagined before she encountered these merciless hooligans. Indeed, actress Scarlett Johansson would be the whole show if Morgan Freeman weren't lecturing in cutaways as a prestigious physician, Professor Samuel Norman, whose ranks as the foremost expert on gray matter. When Professor Norman isn't delivering lectures to enthralled audiences about the percentage of use that humans derive from their noodles, Besson treats us to illuminating National Geographic documentary excerpts of jungle animals that punctuate the running battle Lucy has with the heavily-armed Asian drug smugglers. Korean actor Choi Min-shik, who starred in director Chan-wook Park's first version of the revenge thriller "Oldboy" (2003), makes a memorable villain named Mr. Jang that you will love to hate. Furthermore, Mr. Jang's immaculately tailored henchmen are as homicidal as he is until he meets our feminist heroine after she experiences a massive change in her attitude. Interestingly enough, before she made "Lucy," Scarlett Johansson made "Under the Skin," a sci-fi thriller about an alien who masquerades as a human who preys on lonely men in Scotland. For the record, Besson had cast Angelina Jolie as the lead, but Jolie had to drop out, so Johansson stepped into the part.
The first time we see Lucy (Scarlett Johansson of "The Avengers"), she is arguing with her straw cowboy-hat clad scummy boyfriend, Richard (Pilou AsbÃ¦k of "The Whistleblower"), in front of a fashionable, high-rise hotel in Taiwan. Richard is struggling to convince Lucy to deliver a sleek briefcase to a motel guest named Mr. Jang. Richard insists that he cannot personally hand the briefcase over to Mr. Jang. Lucy refuses to deliver the briefcase. She asks Richard about the contents of the briefcase. As it turns out, Richard doesn't have a clue about what is in the briefcase. Their entire argument sounds like something that Quentin Tarantino's characters argued about in "Pulp Fiction." Everything in the seminal crime thriller "Pulp Fiction" turned on the mysterious contents of a cryptic briefcase. Just as Lucy is about to walk away from Richard, the jerk of a scumbag handcuffs the brief case to her wrist so she cannot get it off. Eventually, she relents and enters the motel while Richard watches her. Suffice to say, things go downhill like an avalanche for both Richard and our heroine. The action sequences in "Lucy" are breathtaking, especially the predictable but exciting car chase through Paris. Besson charts the action according to the percentage of brainpower that our heroine is able to harness until fade-out when she concludes her incredible metamorphosis.
Quite simply, "Lucy" unfolds as a standard-issue, darkly-themed, revenge thriller in the vein of something notorious horror maestro Eli Roth of "Hostel" fame would perpetrate. About half-way through its lean, mean 90 minutes, this nimble Universal Pictures release changes our protagonist from a shanghaied schoolgirl into a gal who doesn't need a guy to save her bacon. She becomes the equivalent of Liam Neeson in the "Taken" thrillers and then she even surpasses him! She doesn't even have to rely on guns. Initially, the villains round up not only poor Lucy but also three other guys and sew several bags of strange blue crystals called CPH4 into their bodies. Basically, CPH4 amounts to the equivalent of stuff that pregnant moms produce to cultivate their fetuses. Somebody utters ominously enough about the substance: ""For a baby, it packs the power of an atomic bomb."" Our ingenious heroine manages to escape the clutches of the bad guys, and she alerts the authorities about herself and the other mules. Unfortunately, the police aren't prepared for the commitment that the criminals have to their product. As the bullets begin to fly, bodies stack up in piles. These villains are armed with more than just fully automatic weapons. Before the dust settles, however, Besson's crime thriller transforms into a mind-boggling science fiction actioneer reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey." Literally, the heroine becomes the equivalent of the monolith in the Kubrick film. Indeed, the ending is a mind blower in itself and you may feel cheated by the ending. Nevertheless, nothing that you have seen this summer will prepare you for this supercharged little saga.