Director Luc Besson is a bit of an odd one: he’s up there with James Cameron when it comes to creating kick-ass females (Le Femme Nikita, The Fifth Element), he’s had a hand in the current career trajectories of Jason Statham and Liam Neeson, but his own directorial output of late has been spotty to say the least (The Family, that animated Arthur trilogy). Lucy pretty much represents Besson giving a massive middle finger to his critics and just doing what he likes, and thankfully for him – and us – that’s a very good thing.
Scarlett Johansson plays Lucy, a party-hard tourist in Taiwan who gets caught up in a drug smuggling operation by big bad guy Mr. Jang (Oldboy’s Min-Sik Choi), but when the bag of experimental narcotics busts open in her stomach, she discovers that it can promptly boost her brain usage from the everyday 10% to potentially 100%. It also, inexplicably, will kill her within 24 hours, so she jets off to Paris to meet Professor Norman (Morgan Freeman, essentially our on-screen narrator) to put her newfound powers to good use, while Mr. Jang gives murderous chase.
Kicking off not unlike Bradley Cooper’s IQ booster Limitless, it’s not long before you realise that Lucy is Besson’s original superhero story, with the additional brain power unlocking new abilities that slowly turns Scar-Jo into Doctor Manhattan from Watchmen. He also has few nods towards The Matrix and Akira, with the scientific techno-babble akin to a toddler playing with their letter blocks and accidentally spelling out E=MC2; we all know it’s not an actual sign of intelligence, but we’re all willing to play along cos it’s fun.
Johansson does good work early on as the clueless victim, before having a personality wipe while retaining her on-screen charisma once the transcendence begins. Besson tries to keep things grounded for a while with some kinetic car-chases and shoot-outs, before going certifiably crazy in the last twenty minutes which sees him bid adieu to any sense of realism and the movie becomes full tilt bonkers.
Simultaneously terribly brilliant and brilliantly terrible, we’ve finally got one of modern cinemas most fun and inventive directors back to being fun and inventive. But unlike Lucy, it’s best to not overthink it.