Why So Blu?

‘Lucy’ Mixes With The Matrix Instead Of The Transporter (Movie Review)

I’m not sure what happened, but sometime circa the Black Widow’s entrance into the Marvel Cinematic Universe in Iron Man 2 and later on in movies such as Don Jon and most recently Under the Skin (my full Blu-ray reviews of those two titles can be found here and here) I have become a HUGE fan of the sexy starlet Scarlett Johansson.  Who isn’t, right?  However, I’m not too happy that she’s pregnant and in the process kind of shuffled things around on the newest Avengers set with not one but three stunt doubles, but I suppose a girl has to do what a girl has to do.  After all, she did give me one very fine looking performance that I’ll never forget in my favorite Michael Bay movie of all-time, The Island, which came out in 2005 before all those aforementioned movies above.  So I suppose I will let her surprise pregnancy slip into the farthest, darkest and remotely inaccessible areas of my brain (since I’m using less than 10% of it) because it absolutely gives me great pleasure to chat about Scarlett and her latest action vehicle down below…Lucy!

Truth be told, even before this film’s release date it has been under quite the amount of scrutiny simply because of the film’s “ridiculous” tagline that reads: THE AVERAGE PERSON USES 10% OF THEIR BRAIN CAPACITY.  IMAGINE WHAT SHE CAN DO WITH 100%.  Alright, that may not be 100% medically accurate.  Truth be told we use more than 10% of our brain, but who cares?!  Do you?!  For a film whose trailer literally equates to the word FUN, who are you to put this movie down because of its tagline?  In essence, the trailer promises something almost Transporter-like crazy, but that tagline really does sell it well, doesn’t it?  Sure it does!  Let’s think about it, pull back the layers and examine it some more.  If you watch the trailer, you immediately get the tagline.  It’s practically spelled out for you.  Do we really need to make things more complex here?  NO!  NOT AT ALL!  Guys, we have Scarlett Johansson kicking a$$ throughout here in the trailer.  Speaking for most guys, I can assure you we’re not paying attention to that tagline in this feature any more than we are to Morgan Freeman’s freckles.  You see, women and men alike are going into this movie for two main reasons: to have a fun time and to see Scarlett kick a lot of a$$ and look sexy as hell doing it.  So I guess you can say for those two reasons alone, the trailer for Lucy accomplishes much more than the whole feature film of Sex Tape even did last week for those who were brave enough to check it out, huh?  But what does the movie itself deliver on?  That is the question of the hour, isn’t it?  Read on…

How do I say this politely without turning anybody off right away?  The trailer for Lucy, the film you think you are going into and seeing is not the movie you’re getting.  Does that make sense?  The trailer, as we discussed up above, is fun.  The movie, although fun at times, is anything but that most of the time.  It may start off like the promise of the trailer, but it takes a sharp right turn into the world of sic-fi almost as hard knocking as The Matrix trilogy.  You are probably going into this one expecting a wild romping time like in the first two Transporter films or even Crank for that matter, but if you are not a fan of the sic-fi genre, you’re going to leave one pissed off movie patron.  As the credits rolled and I sat there baffled at what I just saw trying to come up with subjective and critical words for my response sheet for the studio I just thought to myself, a lot of paying customers come Friday are going to walk out of this one very mad.  It’s not that Scarlett Johansson did anything wrong.  It’s actually quite the contrary.  It’s just that Hollywood did it again and gave you what you want to see in a trailer and lured you in under false pretenses almost like Scarlett’s character did to her Scottish men in Under The Skin, a far superior Johansson flick.  Cha ching!

Now luckily for me, being a fan of science fiction, I was able to hang in here.  The film started off really quirky and fun, complete with cute animal copulations and hilarious photo bombs, but once Act 2 hit things started spiraling out of control.  I can’t put my finger on it, even a day later while writing this, but it just didn’t feel like this one was built upon a cohesive foundation.  The ground felt shaky and no longer stable past Act 1.  However, the first fifteen minutes or so I was silently thinking about how much I was going to love this on the Blu-ray format, but by the end I was contemplating would I even spend the time reviewing it if Universal offered it to our website in three to four months.  Oh hell!  Of course I would!  It has Scarlett Johansson in it, but I digress.  Is Scarlett enough to save this feature?  Yes…and…no.  She does a fine job with what she was given here.  She even reminded me a bit of her gullible and innocent performance in The Island, so that much was cute and lovable about her.  But I wanted more a$$ kicking!  I craved more violence.  And finally, I yearned for more action!  The film, sadly, did not deliver on any of those and therefore, if you’re not willing to put up with some very high-concept, strong sic-fi ingredients in your movies, you’re never ever going to want to make the return trip here.  This is a one-way flight, not a round-trip.

So let’s talk about the direction here before we call it a day.  Lucy is directed and written by Luc Besson, the same guy who brought you The Fifth Element, so I guess you can’t scream you were blind-sided by this ultimate, Matrix-like sci-fi ride.  The film has a couple themes going for it like knowledge, self-discovery and I guess you can say even becoming more of a hero.  I’m sure one might be prone to call that immortality, but in the grand scheme of things I’m trying to keep this review as spoiler free as possible.  I know I did not mention him here yet either, but I suppose I should make reference to the fact that Morgan Freeman shows up as a supporting actor and like the character of Morpheus to Neo in The Matrix, Freeman does a fine job as Professor Norman to Lucy in this one.  God!  You don’t know how bad I want to keep dropping Matrix hints here and there in this review.  Like Neo in The Matrix, Lucy is all about the self-discovery of one’s power and ultimately finding out what they are made of and what they can be.  In The Matrix you have the Oracle, but in Lucy all you have are hypotheses.  I guess for me, getting past all the rah rah that this is not the action flick I came for, the biggest problem for me was the ending.  It had that kind of problem with the main character’s resolution that people rag on The Raiders of the Lost Ark for, but in a much more lethal dose.  The ending scene, depicting what happens to Lucy and what gets passed onto the world of science, in my opinion, was asinine, but the rest of the flick,  unlike the drugs Lucy ingests on her marathon sprint to using 100% of her brain, was tolerable, to say the least.  I would encourage you to do some scientific soul searching before jumping on this one thinking you’re going to see Scarlett looking hot kicking a$$.  She still does that and all, but it’s minimal at best.  Enjoy!