Two movies and a documentary.

Rating: 2/10 (26 October 2014)

There are two movies here. One is a sort of sequel/rehash of The Professional, only instead of the frailty of the human condition we have Super Matilda. The other movie is the story of a Buddha-like figure. And then there is a sort of documentary during the first portions of the movie. This three things did not work together.
Maybe it can be done, maybe you can have Super Matilda attain Nirvana while Morgan Freeman narrates, but if that can be done, I'm pretty sure it's not Besson who can do it, he's too enamored with visuals. That overlong car chase? That could have been used for some character development, we could have spent that time exploring how Lucy's brain works in a more meaningful way than with colorful meta human user interfaces.
Perhaps this movie could have worked is Lucy was less of a Mary-Sue, or if Besson had dared to defy film clichés and made her even more of a Mary-Sue and destroy the pedestrian conflict we all could see coming and which is exclusively Lucy's fault by omission, and then include an even bigger and mind blowing conflict latter on, you now, actually challenge the audience instead of pretending to do so with the justification for the premise, which is no challenge at all.
Perhaps it could have been better... no, I'm certain it would have been better if Besson had gone all out Urban Fantasy on this movie. Why attempt to give us such a weak justification for the premise? We don't actually need it, and providing this 10% crap only results in breaking the suspension of disbelief. Just tell us the drug can make her super, and keep on going from there, no further explanation, no pseudo scientific mumbo jumbo; you could have your Super Matilda that way, or even your Lucy-Buddha. Tell us it's magic, tell us she just is the next step on human evolution, tell us not to ask why it works and if the rest is enjoyable, that's all we need. But don't disrespect our intelligence with this pseudo science that will only make us question more of the film.
The documentary part, I don't know, maybe if this was a self aware comedy the mockumentary could have worked.
But in the end this would have worked much better if it had been only one of the movies it tried to be.
I never dreamed of saying this, but taking Morgan Freeman out of this could have only benefited it, since with him in it all we can see is how horribly he's being wasted.
And no, I did not disliked it only because of the 10% thing or because I didn't got it. I got it, there just wasn't that much to get, the final story has been told a lot of times before, and much better. Hell, "Her", in which also stars Johannson, deals with a somewhat similar subject and it does it so much better there is no comparison, because "Her" knows how to deal with a semi spiritual subject, mainly don't do it head on because it will disappoint. In "Her" we don't know how the A.I. was achieved or how it works, and the story is so good that we don't care. No, the main reason I disliked this movie was because Besson forced the story, he mashed his three ideas together and made them fit by pure brute force, and that does not leave you with a beautiful piece, it leaves you with the bloody mangled corpse of a story.
And yet, the visuals are pretty and Lucy is a bad ass, not truly a super intelligent bad ass as she's supposed to be, but a bad ass nonetheless.