Garbage

Rating: 4/10 (3 February 2015)

It's hard to believe that i'm reviewing this film in February, considering how excited I was to see this film. I would have guaranteed that I would have seen it in theatres. The trailer came out almost a year ago and it instantly became one of my most anticipated for the summer. It's Scarlett Johansson in a Science Fiction based action film, what can go wrong? Especially with the writer director from Leon: The Professional and Taken? It had so many good things going for it, but sadly it was poorly executed.
Johansson still had a great 2014 with The Winter Solider and Under The Skin, and she sure earned a lot of money from Lucy. But I think she has to regret how Lucy turned out. It tells the story of a random girl who gets a drug injected into her stomach, in turn allowing her to access her entire brain. Now I have heard from multiple people that we as humans in fact use much more than 10 percent of our brain. Apparently it's actually close to 100 percent. Even putting this aside the movie is garbage. There is absolutely no depth to these characters. None of the supporting characters are given material for us to care about. Even in Lucy's case, the only glimpse of depth was a short phone call to her mother. I guess I'm just not the audience for Artificial Intelligence films. Transcendence, A.I., and now Lucy. Here's hoping that Chappie can right that ship.
The film also uses several strange cuts to animals reproducing and other tasks. But it's not like it's in an intelligent and ambitious way, because the cuts stop 15 minutes into the film. We don't get any sense of why they chose to perform this procedure on Scarlett or any back-story with this drug or the people behind this deal. It's a really dull film that is saved by Scarlett Johansson's solid performance and some surreal special effects. It was enough to make the film watchable for 90 minutes but I cant see that being the case for any longer. It tries to be much more ambitious and smart than it actually is. I would much rather have seen a revenge type story with Scarlett going after the gangsters, much like a Taken style film. With a better back-story with Lucy and the supporting characters.
+Scarlett
+Special effects & concept
-Strange cuts
-No character depth
-No back-story of the drug
-No likable characters
4.5/10