A "straight boy" phenomenon: star and film

Rating: 6/10 (5 August 2014)

Like her current film - which may well be a kind of apotheosis, summing hp her career to this point - Scarlett Johanssson strikes this viewer as an extremely limited actress who has had the intelligence (or luck) to choose challengingly off-beat projects put together on highly commercially successful models. Her visceral appeal may best be understood by extremely straight boys with hormones raging - the target demographic for many of the violent "action" films like LUCY turns out to be.
Johansson's current film, LUCY, purports to be an examination of the (at one time) oft discussed but somewhat controversial idea (controversial in being overstated more than actually wrong) that most humans only use a small portion of their brain's potential and could achieve untold intellectual (or other) feats if they could access more. It bolsters its advertised claim to seriousness by casting as co-lead the gravitas of Morgan Freeman as a scientist who lectures in the film's first moments on that theory - while Johansson takes the audience into the unrealistic flights of gory and supernatural fantasy the film's creators are really interested in. Long before Freeman's pseudo lecture is over, Johansson's irresponsible character in the film's real plot-line is being sucked into the film's violent chase plot with Chinese drug dealers trying to export an apparently highly addictive blue crystalline drug (whose main "high" results from opening up greater portions of the brain - a gimmick used in half a dozen recent films with fewer plot gaps) into the west and control same.
Four over-sized plastic bags of the drug are surgically packed into the stomachs of apparently kidnapped "mules" to be flown by normal commercial routes from Taipai to Berlin, Paris and Rome but, for reasons never explained, Johansson is sidetracked into a dungeon before she can catch her U.S. bound flight, apparently to be beaten and raped. The beating ruptures her plastic stomach bag leading to her discovering never logically explained powers both intellectual and psycho-kinetic enabling her escape to search for medical help and starting a violent 'round the world chase. Characters from drug mules to policemen to drug cartel heavies to innocent bystanders are strewn about in celebratory explosions of blood with the utmost carefree abandon which should spell a happy commercial future for audiences of teenage boys - but not so much for fans of serious science fiction.
The film does ultimately (with the bad guys closing in - bloody violence continuing unabated) reach Johansson's well advertised use of 100% of her brain's potential and any sense of reality is left behind for the more rarefied reaches of transmogrifying fantasy well trod by second and third tier "sci-fi" movies and TV fantasy shows long before.
If you enjoyed this season's earlier (April 18) Johnny Depp/Morgan Freeman exercise, TRANSCENDENCE, which explored much the same territory with somewhat surer plotting and pacing, you should enjoy this ultra violent action fantasy (to call it legitimate science fiction is a stretch), but the abrupt conclusion of both films once they reached where they said they were going in their ads and the creators ran out of ideas diminishes the impact of LUCY just as it did TRANSCENDENCE.
In both cases, some interesting ideas were wasted on ultimately unsatisfying films. That's a real pity in both cases, but at least in the case of LUCY, unless you're in the mood for a "super shoot 'em up," you are let down early on. The satisfaction for a appetite for intelligent science fiction is "lite" at best - and a few more presumably well paid exploitations of his "gravitas" like these and Morgan Freeman's stock as a serious actor may start to tarnish seriously no matter how high the opening week grosses.