Lucy - Pseudo-Philosophical Bullshit

Why did I decide it was a good idea to go and see Lucy on Saturday evening?  I'm not sure I can come up with a reason that makes sense, other than the fact that one of my friends had already seen the film I wanted to see and that I guess the advertising campaign had done enough to make me go 'hmmm'.  The film is based on the pseudo-scientific premise that humans only use 10% of their brain capacity, and we are asked to imagine what would be possible if we used more.  Apparently we would turn into Neo from The Matrix (but with a much less interesting outcome).  Btw, this contains spoilers as it's so shit I don't care.

The 'plot' is that Scarlett Johansson is the down-and-out Lucy in Taiwan who is convinced by her shitty boyfriend into delivering a shady package to some Korean gangsters.  Everything goes wrong and she ends up being used as an unwilling drug mule, the drugs sewn into her abdomen.  When the drugs leak, they start to make her able to use more than 10% of her brain.  She immediately turns into a detached super-heroine, able to escape from her captors with ease and hunt down the people who did this to her.  As the portion of her brain she's able to use increases, she becomes less human and more powerful - capable of manipulating others and the world around her.

Morgan Freeman plays the sort of oracle character in Lucy that he has become type-cast as in recent years.  At the start he literally delivers a deeply unscientific lecture on his theories about humanity using > 10% of their brains, he the continues as the film's narrator, explaining plot points as they come along.  The Morgan Freeman parts feel like filler, which is true of a surprising amount of a film that's only 90 minutes long.  There's an awful cgi-heavy car chase through Paris and a gun fight that exist I think only to convince people who aren't into pop-philosophy that this is an action film.  Then there are the constant cuts to nature footage (do we really need to cut to a montage of nature documentary stuff to understand what Morgan Freeman means when he talks about animal reproduction?) and the insanely dragged-out opening scene, all filler.  This film could have been an episode of The Outer Limits if they cut all that out.

The opening scene is particularly terrible.  It spends several minutes in a close-up back-and-forth conversation between Lucy and her boyfriend, doing no character development and failing to set the scene in any way while he whines at her to deliver the package.  Then when she does she's obviously scared of the gangsters she's delivering it to, do we really need to cut to footage of a scared deer running from cheetahs to demonstrate her fear?  I think we got it already!  Though I will admit a possible visual foreshadowing of the rest of the movie here that was quite nice; when we cut to the deer being stalked by cheetahs, we naturally assume that Lucy is the deer in the metaphor.  However, Lucy is wearing a leopard-skin top at the time - perhaps foreshadowing that she's really the hunter here?

Regardless of that.  This is a film that's obsessed with a pop pseudo-philosophy that thinks if only humans could just use more of their brains we would all be superheroes / better off / have more knowledge / all get along man / whatever.  When Lucy finally achieves 100% brain usage she seems to go off travelling through time and space, all the time Morgan Freeman explaining what's going on as she transforms into some sort of black organic computer oracle.  She then produces a USB stick on which Morgan Freeman insists "all her knowledge" is stored.  What knowledge?  For who?  For what purpose?  Why am I still watching this?

Lucy is a film that's trying far too hard to 'mean' something.  It's an interesting premise that could either have been an action film where she has to find and fight the gangsters, or a science fiction film based on Flowers for Algernon.  We could have joined Lucy on a journey in which she slowly loses her humanity and how by striving to enhance herself to become 'better', but forgets what it was like to be the person she once was.  None of this happens though.  In the end Lucy is a loose collection of philosophical babble and half-conceived action scenes.  Please, for the love of all that is good in cinema, do not watch this film.

At least I had a free burrito before the film, so Saturday evening wasn't a total waste of time.