Lucy has alerted the Paris police that a larger group of Chinese mobsters are coming to the university. IN ONE TRACKING SHOT – A mass of police cars screech to a halt and 50 cops run into the building while DIRECTLY across the street five black BMWs are parked end to end with the trunks open as 25 Chinese mobsters in black suits assemble an arsenal of massive machine guns and a bazooka. For NONE of the cops to just look LEFT for a split second is hilarious. And sadly it is not the only directorial oversight.
Here’s the pitch, deal with it.
Remember when you got really high and said “man, if we could just use 100 % of our brain matter than we could TOTALLY alter reality.”
Then imagine that you’re a drug mule that gets kicked in the drug pack that is sewn inside you. When it leaks out, instead of killing you with an overdose, it makes you a brilliant killer with 100% brain capacity to alter all of reality.
Luc Bresson clearly trying to jam sophomore philosophy 101 courses with crowd pleasing gun play and car chases for a WILDLY uneven movie that is at times thought provoking and a cheesy rip off of Asian gangster films. I bet when it is translated in French and Mandarin it will come out much better.
The first 20 minutes come off like a screenwriting class exercise where the “what happens next” question builds with a series of twists. At the end of the 20 minutes we are now committed to follow Scarlett Johansson as she ramps up to using all of her brain. And you would think, from the trailer, that Morgan Freeman is trying to stop her, but, in fact, he is nothing more than a mouth piece for pseudoscience that comes across like a very unentertaining TED talk. In the second half his only job is to stand bewildered as Lucy alters reality as her brain starts firing on all cylinders.
If only everyone else making the film fired up a few brain cylinders, then you would have had something.
Luc Besson is either very tired or very lazy with his filmmaking. Early in the film when she is taken hostage, it seems like Mr. Besson said to an assistant “It is like a cheetah is attacking a gazelle, go on YouTube and find me some footage of a cheetah killing a gazelle and I’ll cut that in on this scene.” And sure enough, that happens.
So I don’t want to not like this movie, but there is so little to hang onto here. It is mostly a collection of trailer clips with Morgan Freeman single-handedly trying to hold the narrative center. To trash the rest of it would be mean.
Dean Haglund
