The more "Lucy" stews in your head, the more you'll find yourself loving it.

Rating: Null/10 (9 August 2014)

BY RYAN C. SHOWERS
Earlier this week I updated my daily attire with new glasses. "Lucy" is the first movie I saw since the transition between spectacles. Not only did I feel as if I was watching a movie with new eyes, but the film showed me something that I have never seen before. The undeniable fact of "Lucy" is its ingenuity, but be warned, it is a polarizing experience.
Though I hardly find it as trend-setting as some suggest, feminism is embedded deeper within the film than the drugs are planted in Lucy's stomach. The explicit female empowerment almost becomes cheeky satire, such as when Lucy's love interest addresses his expendable nature in the plot, but her response insinuates the best use of his existence is to kiss her while she fights the bad guys. (Women Studies professors across the country will be giddy after seeing "Lucy".) It's incorrect to pretend as if females have not led science fiction/genre films before, especially films that acquired a lucrative gross at the box office. Though Johnasson's Lucy is only a descendant of people like Ellen Ripley, this film's success could turn the tide away from the frequency of male dominated action thrillers.
The first twenty-five minutes of "Lucy" are unbearable. The film's opening moments begin with calm images over Johansson's voice, whispering ideas emblematic of evolution, but that lasts for only moments. The story plunges its viewer into an obnoxiously directed, jarringly edited, and bombastically scored chaos. It would be acceptable if someone were to walk out of "Lucy" during its introductory scenes, even if they would miss the fun surprises to be had later in the film. During the crucial, plot-setting scene, Director Luc Besson interweaves shots of a cheetah killing its prey into the sequence, a pompous move that sinks "Lucy" to its lowest point. It's almost as if Besson was testing his audience through endurance experiments during the first 25 minutes, before getting to a film that wasn't actually that bad.
The quality transition from act one to act two and three is one of the most drastic in recent memory. "Lucy" began as a discomforting experience, but something happens after the dust settles from the storm of act one. The material is given the space it needs to breathe, Besson takes his dead weight foot off the gas pedal, and "Lucy" begins to fly. In the second two thirds of the film, the tone is infused with real emotion, campy fun, and soothing tranquility. Besson relinquishes his domineering approach seen in the earlier scenes and lets the erroneous ideas speak for themselves. The film concludes with a sensational montage that exposes the radical ambition behind "Lucy".
For however disproportionate the film itself becomes, the one constant is Scarlett Johansson's drilling performance. Johansson can add "Lucy" to her string of hits recently because in this role she shows emotion in the most melodramatic ways I've ever seen from her as an actress. In addition, she builds a grounded, cold state of omnipotence in later scenes of the film, creating a nice emotional range within the movie and the character.
"Lucy" has ideal pacing and storytelling methods, clocking in its running time at 89 minutes. Sure, the introduction was a bit disorienting in its eagerness to jump immediately into the rising action, but that's a forgettable flaw once the running time minutes begin to rack up. It comes and goes swiftly and pragmatically, and maybe that's something future films should try to emulate, in addition to the female dominance. The more "Lucy" stews in your head, the more you'll find yourself loving it.
* * * out of * * * *
6.9/10