Did you know you use only 10 percent of your brain? In some cases, I’m surprised it’s that much. Well, according to writer-director Luc Besson’s “Lucy,” and that great authority Morgan Freeman, if you could increase it, you’d develop powers like a Marvel Avenger or a member of the X-Men.
OK, so that’s all hooey, as it turns out. But “Lucy,” Besson’s action movie extravaganza with the sci-fi icing, featuring Scarlett Johansson sharing the title role with a prehistoric, humanoid ape, is a whole lot of dumb fun. It may be, as many suspected, a mash-up of the Bradley Cooper vehicle “Limitless” and Besson’s own action-movie landmark “La Femme Nikita.” But at a brisk 90 minutes, it’s a uniquely breezy, summer genre film, violent eye-candy with an imagination instead of oppressive CGI, and it’s in gloriously bright 2-D. Vive la femme “Lucy,” I say.
In opening scenes Johansson’s Lucy, an American student in Taiwan with a penchant for bad boyfriends, is forced by latest creep Richard (a terrific mini-turn by Dane Pilou Asbaek) to deliver a locked metal case to which she is handcuffed by him to gangster Mr. Jang (South Korean veteran Min-sik Choi of “Oldboy”). Things go from the proverbial bad to worse. After a packet of super drugs, sewn into her stomach and meant to go on the market, ruptures, Lucy gets a big brain boost and goes all medieval on her tormentors.
Between glimpses of Lucy, who’s convinced she will die and becomes determined to collect all the other packets of drugs to keep her alive and growing in brain power, we hear Freeman playing an acclaimed authority in cerebral science, lecturing and spouting the 10 percent theory, which is a fallacy.
Besson (“Le Dernier Combat,” “The Professional,” “The Fifth Element,” “Taken” and more) may fail at his attempts to plumb Kubrickian-Malickian cosmic profundity in time-travel scenes. But he is the most important and successful European film writer-director-producer of his time. One of his trademarks, outside of global locations, multicultural casts, beautiful heroines and outrageous car chases and shootouts, is having someone slapped hard, and Lucy gets it for sure. But she slaps back.
Analeigh Tipton (“Crazy Stupid Love”) is tartly funny as Lucy’s roommate. Also good is Amr Waked (“Salmon Fishing in the Yemen”) as handsome Paris police Capt. Del Rio.
Johansson, coming off her spooky-sexy turn as a predatory alien in the ultra-creepy “Under the Skin,” is coming into her own for sure. In a role originally intended for “Maleficent” herself Angelina Jolie, Johansson excels and carries the movie with ease. That’s because in addition to her, there’s a lot of Luc in “Lucy.”
(“Lucy” contains extreme violence and sexually suggestive scenes and language.)
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