Oh, Luuuuuuuuccccyyy!
Lucy dir. Luc Besson
The premise of Lucy is cockamamie, its execution wild and borderline ludicrous. Within the first few minutes, a young American expatriate in Taiwan, the eponymous Lucy (Scarlett Johanson), is tricked by her Eurotrash boyfriend (Pilou Asbaek) into service as a drug mule by Korean gangsters. Her recruitment is in the most brutal fashion imaginable: she is terrorized and knocked out, then wakes up to realize that a hefty pouch of drugs has been inserted into her stomach via quick and dirty surgery. A fellow prisoner shot up with the drug quickly babbles and dies, so in case we doubted it, we know Lucy is in a dangerous predicament indeed!
When Lucy is roughed up by her captors, the package bursts, and its psychedelic burden unleashes itself into her body. Lucy writhes in torment, and it appears that she is about to share the fate of the manic babbler. Only, whether it is due to her particular body chemistry or her character or fate, or possibly to a Keith Richard-esque notion that a little bit of drug may kill you but a whole bunch will make you stronger, the stuff surging en masse through her veins ignites some sort of, I guess we have to call it radical transformation, of Lucy. It fucks her up in a physics-defying way: a force seems to pin her to the wall, then to the ceiling. Then it loosens its grip, or at least seems to.
What returns to consciousness is not the terrorized Lucy of a few minutes ago, but a trans-human entity formerly known as Lucy (THEFKAL). THEFKAL is still, self-possessed, free of fear, potent, plus, as we will soon learn, cold-blooded and also a super-freaking genius. The screen flashes us the figure “10%,” and rather than wonder why all the action has been capped off with a percentage, we have some inkling of what this means because, interspersed with the otherwise taut opening sequence involving Lucy, we’ve also found ourselves at a lecture half a world away given by one Professor Norman (Morgan Freeman) to a group of fairly credulous grad student types. His subject? The amazing untapped capacity of the human brain, a 90% reserve that could literally blow our minds if only we homo sapiens could access it. Yes, Lucy is that sort of movie - the sort where someone explains what is happening while what is happening actually happens. It is also the sort of movie that prompts someone like me to use the word homo sapiens when writing about it, not simply because Professor Norman probably slips these words into his lecture once or twice, but also because the opening scene of the movie, twenty or so minutes back, is of a humanoid figure that is definitely not a homo sapiens, but who definitely has something to do with what we’re about to see (or be told about), particularly when Lucy’s soon-to-be ex-boyfriend charmingly tells her that he’s visited a museum in New York, where he learned that man’s earliest ancestor is known as Lucy - just like her!
So once the 10% message goes away - it’s really just a little longer than the blink of an eye, I don’t want you to think it remains there for some uncomfortable length of time, it most certainly does not! - Lucy dispatches her captors with brute force and gunplay, then commandeers a surgery in progress to expedite removal of the drug sack, dispatching the current patient in the process (in her defense, her newly acquired smarts allow her to diagnose the patient as beyond saving). And despite all the talk of expanded mental capacity, it is not entirely mind-blowing when Lucy contacts Professor Norman to pick his brains about his knowledge of what has happened to her.
Turns out this drug in her body is a synthetic form of a hormone found in fetuses that boosts brain development. A-ha! Lucy and the professor conclude that she is on her way to 100% brain capacity in about 24 hours, after which time she will probably expire. Thusly informed, Lucy decides she will spend the next 12 hours on a freaking plane flying to meet Professor Norman. Lest you worry that this is not time well-spent, rest assured that she spends it boning up on everything there is to know from all times and places via a couple of flickering laptops. Also, due to reaching new levels of brain capacity (we are up to 30% or 40% at this point, if my sub-10-percent mind recalls correctly), her body begins to melt away shortly before landing (which is actually not that weird an experience for those like me who are nervously sweaty about flying, but anyway).
It’s around here that Lucy fully enters a state that we could crudely describe as psychic, except we’re meant to understand it’s not just some airy fairy stuff like we see in Carrie or The Fury or some other film not directed by Brian DePalma, but a flat-out interface and manipulation of the power of the universe through access to that wild and clearly quite useful yet normally unused 90% of the human brain. Armed assailants rise slowly like balloons slipped loose at some young kid’s birthday party, and we sense that Lucy is starting to have a funky relationship vis-a-vis time, as she drives a car against multi-lane Paris traffic in apparent anticipation of what other drivers are going to do (apart from just freak the hell out).
Everything culminates in Lucy becoming more or less all powerful and all knowing, but not before she manages to build a super computer that (I think) summarizes everything she’s learned in her wild 24 hours of increasing brain usage. We are also given a moment in which she interacts with that primordial human we saw at the beginning of the film, like a play on 2001 where in place of the monolith some advanced version of humanity itself returns to impart a spark of consciousness to its heavy-browed forebears.
Luc Besson’s vision of a post-human warrior goddess feels pretty loosey-goosey (or should I say, Lucy-goosey? Ha!), based on some highly speculative and silly-ish leaps about how humanity and the rest of the universe might all fit together. Certainly early in the film, I wondered if all the talk about accessing brain capacity was a ruse, and that Besson was just looking for a way to have the formerly helpless Lucy kick ass and take names in increasingly powerful ways. But even if this is part of the motivation here, and as pulpy as the premise is, you have to give Besson some credit for going all the way with this vision, as we accompany Lucy on her trip into something that ends up looking a whole lot like transcendence.
Johansson’s performance feels fine but unremarkable; she’s playing something of a robot here, and I didn’t feel the subtleties and mystery that I did in her somewhat analogous performance as an alien(ish) visitor in the recent Under the Skin. And how could there be, really? From the moment of her transformation, her increased brain capacity somehow leave out things like empathy, love, and other human qualities you’d hope would be pumped to the max once all our brain cells really started pitching in. There is one scene, or rather a series of scenes, when Lucy is loosed from the surly bonds of linear time and gasps in wonder as she witnesses dinosaurs, the beginning of the earth, and yes, very possibly, the earliest Lucy of them all. This was a rare moment of a broader vision of wonder; too bad it’s overwhelmed by all the film’s earthly action and brainiac machinations.