Bulging with excess and pseudo-science and effects...all in good fun

Rating: 6/10 (29 September 2014)

Lucy (2014)
If you take the contents of this movie seriously you are very open minded—because the "science" here is total fantasy. It's science fiction in an ungrounded, wing-it kind of liberation. That's why some reviewers hated it (see the one in The Atlantic via Rotten Tomatoes). And I hated that aspect, myself.
But this is a completely cheerful kind of mindless movie on some other level. It's actually funny (laugh out loud funny) in many parts, if you're paying attention (the most obvious is when the American Indians are shown). There are wry comments and a kind of chipper exaggeration throughout that make it all kind of bright, even when crazy and deadly things are happening.
There is also the kind of action-adventure pace, with lots of moving camera (some of it really good) and lots of fast edits (without resorting to montage). There is also plenty of computer graphic excess, and sometimes it's great and sometimes it's just self- indulgent and almost boring.
Scarlett Johansson holds it all together well, playing the emotionless type of character she just played in last year's "Under the Skin." I like her! Morgan Freeman plays a scientist, a dull version of his Lucius Fox (from "Batman"). The rest of the cast is there to prop up these two (and mostly Johansson, who is the title character), but it's worth noticing, I suppose, that there is the common Hollywood pandering to the huge Asian (Chinese) audience it hopes to seduce. There are lots and lots of Korean bad guys (all are men but one, a tattoo artist). And there is lots of shooting, both in Taiwan and in Paris, where the second half of the movie is set. (The movie is officially a French production, but is mostly in English.)
The movie has pretensions, which is its biggest downfall. Instead of just being silly and fun (like "Guardians of the Galaxy") it has big (empty) ideas to foist on us. The opening scenes of the movie set this up, a kind of fast motion "2001" beginning. (Director/writer Luc Besson admits this, sort of.) And the very last moment of the movie makes clear the concepts here are "big." And so the trick is to keep it light and enjoy the humor and get wowed by the effects.