Flatters to deceive

Rating: 5/10 (30 March 2020)

This is a hard movie to rate so I've gone down the middle. There are some pretty spectacular action scenes and the visuals are incredible but the whole movie is too fast paced and any and all character development has been abandoned. The film really suffers for this, Johansson's role in particular, as her character is very difficult to connect with. I don't agree that she played it well, she was a hackneyed stereotype "dumb" New York broad at the outset and then tried to juxtapose that against a permanently serious, hyper-intelligent robot after her drug enhancement. The former character was a lazy effort and the latter just came across as wooden. If Keanu Reeves irritated you in The Matrix then so will she. There was a scene that tried to connect the two characters together, where she talked to her mother during transition but it didn't work and there were no vestiges left of her initial character. Some conflict in terms of what she loses from her original life versus what she gains from her super powers would have been interesting.
Of course it's ridiculous to get all worked up about the scientific nonsense in the film, it is sci-fi. What bothers me though is that there's no real reward for the viewer in accepting the premise, there are many philosophical and moral concepts that could have been explored. At the half way point it's all set up for this, then Luc just downloads a pointless shoot out scene (why weren't these "bad guys" just killed at the start anyway? Lucy had no problem killing others at random and she hated the mafia goons more than anyone). This is accompanied by a good 15-20 minutes of full throttle CGI, zooming around time and space with no obvious purpose.
The plot suggested that the climax of the film was the unveiling of the inner workings of the universe, this ultimate knowledge to then be deposited on a pen drive for the good of mankind (in some way, again not explored). It might have looked like some mysterious black hole pen drive but it could have been a 5 dollar stick from Walmart quite frankly because all that she explored was the history of the universe as we already know it anyway! There was nothing other than currently accepted theories of evolution, the asteroid collision and separation of our moon, the forming of our solar system from nebulae and lots more of that all the way back to the big bang! There was a bit just before this where the big bang was sucking its source material from another parallel plane but it wasn't a patch on how Men In Black did it, with the universe in a marble that aliens are playing with. Now that was thought provoking.
If you treat the film as a pure, mindless action flick then it's entertaining. Just don't get drawn into thinking that it's going to provide any level of pathos or cerebral stimulation because it rips you off on that front after sewing the seeds so well initially. The ending was flat as a pancake. A shame, as Leon showed us what Luc Besson is capable of.