Scarlett's got a Mega mind

Rating: 4/10 (6 October 2014)

You know Luc Besson has had a strange career, he has directed some great classics like The Fifth Element, Leon and Nikita, he has produced over 100 movies and written above 50, he is a man who has had a hand in everything and still has the most random of tastes in movies, if there is a man who can be shown as the metre stick of both success and failure in Hollywood then I submit to you it is indeed Luc Besson, and Lucy is a perfect reflection of the man who stands behind it.
Lucy is a film of both highs and lows, the movie starts strong and has a premise we haven't seen 10,000 times before (but we have seen at least once previously), then around the middle it starts to show moments of weakness (spliced with a feeling of an ulterior motive) until it totally loses it's way and comes clean off the rails for it's finale. Now, that's not to say there is nothing to be enjoyed or there is no fun to be had with Lucy, in fact far from it.
Stop me when you've heard this one before; an average nobody takes an experimental drug which lets them unlock all of their brain capacity, because of this new power foreign gangsters chase after them. The ironic thing about Lucy is that the film is at it's best when it's most parallels Limitless, because that is when the entire affair is most lucid, once Besson is allowed to indulge himself things become overly complicated and bizarre.
The pinnacle of Lucy's madness (Without giving away the ending) is that there is a sequence in a plane where Lucy quite literally disintegrates, we are never shown the end of that scene or how she is transported to an airport hospital. It is one of the most obvious gaping holes in a movie I have ever personally seen, and it feels careless, as if Besson doesn't care about the script or story as long as he can have the sequences he wants in his movie.
It's true, Lucy filming has this surreal kind of schizophrenia to it, there are points in the movie that are spliced together with stock footage of human society and how we have evolved or an animal being hunted down and attacked, just randomly placed in the middle of a sequence as if Besson is having trouble concentrating on his own movie and needs to liven up the joint.
I can't express how odd the ending of Lucy is and how much it degenerates into just a pleasure factory for Luc Besson's visual joys but by the end of the film we were all left scratching out heads in wonder of what the hell it was really all about.
Lucy is portrayed by Scarlett Johansson who is trying her very best to make the role into something of merit, but she rapidly fails, the rest of the cast fit the weird tone of the film, with Morgan Freeman, Min-sik Choi and Julian Rhind-Tutt all putting in an appearance.
Lucy honestly feels like an art house movie without the art. There are moments of pure beauty and brilliance but seconds do not make a movie, minuets do and no matter how hard it tries Lucy always feels like it's a couple of seconds out of time with perfection.