The Fifth Element this isn't

Rating: 4/10 (27 August 2014)

A colourful movie about a beautiful woman possessed of unusual skills or powers? Must be Besson. But unlike previous Luc Besson films, such as Nikita, or particularly The Fifth Element, this film lacks the storytelling elements that make it fun.
***MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS FOR LUCY OR THE FIFTH ELEMENT (ALSO, MAYBE THE MATRIX, BUT, COME ON, YOU HAVEN'T SEEN MATRIX YET?)***
In The Fifth Element, Leeloo is a powerful, genetically engineered being. Due to betrayal and ambush, however, she is killed early in the film but is cloned. What follows is the journey of a wonderful juxtaposition of omnipotent being with a child's mind. She is powerful but vulnerable.
In Lucy, however, ScarJo starts of as a kind of cocky young woman, but after a mishap she begins to utilise more of her brain and as a result gains an increasingly powerful intellect, and bizarrely the ability to do... well, basically whatever is convenient. There's not really any development of her character and she's pretty fine with her new powers and seems to know what's happening to her or anyone else at any moment. As a result it suffers in the same way as the fights in the Matrix sequels.
In the first Matrix, every time Neo gets into a fight or a chase, he develops a little, learning more about himself and the artificial world he inhabits. After awakening as a nearly omnipotent being at the end of that movie, the fight scenes in the sequel don't really have anything riding on them and have nowhere to go. Lucy is similar, in that she, almost immediately, develops the ability to make whatever she wants happen happen, so no one really has a chance against her, and because she seems to take the development in her stride, she doesn't develop much as a character. Regardless, I was expecting the set pieces to be pretty amazing, but they felt like wasted opportunities, she just kind of makes people and/or their guns float a bit. The only time she seems to be in real peril is towards the end when she needs to concentrate on something and so can't be distracted by dealing with the armed criminals and police storming the building she's in, but this seems so contrived as, based on her actions up until that point, it seems she could literally deal with both groups in about 5 minutes tops and then proceed with the work she wants to do.
There are two other issues I had with this film. The first is the acting. I like ScarJo, she pretty, and tends to come across as kind of spunky, as she did in the beginning of the film, but through the majority of the film she is devoid of emotions. I understand this is supposed to be a consequence of her higher intelligence moving her away from petty emotions, but to be honest she doesn't have the acting chops to pull it off. That's not too much of a criticism of her, it's just very very difficult to play a character free of emotion but to inject just enough emotion to make it interesting and not to sound like a first reading. Mads Mikkelsen could do it along with a handful of others, but not ScarJo. Morgan Freeman, on the other hand, has no excuse. He really phones it in, and he doesn't even pretend to give the science any credence, which is understandable as my second problem is with the science.
I'm happy to suspend disbelief, I enjoyed Fringe and Star Trek as well as meatier sci-fi like Primer, but the whole premise of this movie is based on the very outdated, but widely believed notion that humans only use 10% of their brains. This might be true at any one moment, there aren't these massive reserves of power that just have to be unlocked, evolution wouldn't have allowed that waste, for a start. even if we give them this, suddenly having more brain capacity doesn't automatically give you more knowledge, or let you see what happened 2 blocks away from you 3 days ago etc... and not changing your appearance and so forth.
So, I had high hopes for this film, but a boring story line and action sequences, lazy science and concept and poor acting made it one to avoid