Ultimate woman a dull ice queen
Starring: Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman, Min-sik Choi and Amr Waked. Written and directed by Luc Besson. Sci-fi action. 1hr 29min. R16 for violence.
Now showing at Reading and Event cinemas. No one has ever accused French director Luc Besson of being subtle.
His latest bloated sci-fi offering, Lucy, is about as subtle as a brick to the face.
Lucy ( Scarlett Johansson), an American student in Taiwan, is duped into carrying drugs by her oily boyfriend.
He winds up dead, and she winds up with a pouch of blue jelly crystals, drugs, sewn into her body.
When the pouch breaks, she receives a massive dose of the drugs which enhance her mental abilities, granting her access to the 90 per cent of her brain humans never use.
But with a vicious Taiwanese drug dealer on her trail, her time is running out.
In the positive column, Lucy is a big- budget action movie with a woman in the lead for a change.
But like other big-budget action movies with women in the lead, it will fail for the same reason they usually do – we don’t care one iota for the woman in question.
The bubbly, savvy girl we glimpse in the opening scenes is long gone by the time Lucy’s messing with gangster guts and magic bullets, devoured by the boring old Hot Girls With Guns routine.
She strides about hospitals, back streets and airports in the timehonoured tradition of Hot Girls With Guns everywhere, her face a slack mask of bitchiness as she brutally murders and maims anyone in her hyper-cool way.
Only the attentions of gendarme Pierre Del Rio (Amr Waked) can remind her what all her lady parts are really for: looking pretty and kissing. (FYI: yes, you can get eye strain from rolling your eyes too hard.)
All of this nonsense could have been forgiven if only Besson hadn’t been so stingy with the fun.
There are a number of promising fight scenes and a literally smashing car chase through Paris, but these moments of excitement make the same dull point, over and over – Lucy is better than everyone, all the time. Also she is really hot.
One positive is getting to see Korean legend Min-sik Choi ( Old Boy) shooting Paris to pieces. But like everyone else in the film, his garish ganglord is a cartoon, with motivations never more than hinted at.
In fact, there’s a lot about Lucy that feels like a comic-book – one of those big, fat manga epics with hugeeyed waifs fending off grim-jawed men.
Manga is probably Besson’s biggest influence in Lucy ( after, arrogantly, his own work).
But if a 14-year-old’s action wetdream is what you want, then skip Lucy and see Expendables 3 instead.
At least that’ll bring the laughs.