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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Film Review | Lucy
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Film Review | Lucy

A boring pseudo-science tableau. An icy Scarlett Johansson and a 'brain scientist' don't really help

Scarlett Johansson is the eponymous heroine in ‘Lucy’, seeking revenge against a gang of brutal men.Premium
Scarlett Johansson is the eponymous heroine in ‘Lucy’, seeking revenge against a gang of brutal men.

Long car chases through Paris, special effects translating pseudo-scientific ideas into visual extravaganzas, and a trigger-happy heroine who knows the who, when and how of all time and space after having ingested enormous amounts of a deep blue crystalline substance. Director Luc Besson packs in all this into Lucy, his 90-minute history of the universe. Then there is the revenge this eponymous heroine seeks against a gang of brutal men.

How wrong could it go? Surprisingly, a lot.

The outline of Besson’s new film has so much promise. Pulp sci-fi action drama is anyway what Besson does best. The most “Hollywood" among French directors, he has solidified a quasi-European “style over story" aesthetic, or cinéma du look, over two decades as a film-maker. Léon, The Fifth Element and La Femme Nikita, all made in the 1990s, are examples of a style of visual acrobatics that can be both extremely enjoyable and dull, preposterous drivel, depending on the subject.

In Lucy, Besson surprisingly borrows heavily from the idea scheme of Terrence Malick’s cinema. There are scenes of primordial existence, with an ape here and a dinosaur there, vivid replicas of similar creations in Malick’s The Tree Of Life (2011). There are questions about existence that Lucy (Scarlett Johansson), an American student in Taipei, asks once she accidentally reaches that heroic, hyper-drugged state. Besson takes Malick’s ideas and makes them easily digestible perhaps, but at the cost of losing depth entirely (I am unsure, though, which director executes the psychedelia of the ebb and flow of atoms and cells better on screen).

Pop science can be great material for pulp fiction if the writing is sharp. But despite all the pop mastication of ideas we have already seen visualized in Malick’s The Tree Of Life, the fast pace, the special effects, and Johansson looking icy enough but far from the eerie astral guise we have recently seen her in (in Under The Skin, for example), Lucy is a damp squib. A neuroscientist’s (Morgan Freeman’s) reiteration of the popular belief that human beings use only 10% of their brain power, and the possibilities if they used more of it, from a pulpit as his European students nod along, punctuate Lucy’s cross-country and cross-age adventures after she ingests the substance which, we are told, is usually produced in a minuscule amount in pregnant women. Johansson is flat and pale in her martyr-like, superhuman state.

When will she actually start killing, you wonder, and wait. By the time she gets to the climactic tasks, the film is way too multi-coloured, and so half-baked in its philosophical ideas that you don’t care who lives and who perishes.

Lucy releases in theatres on Friday.

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Published: 31 Jul 2014, 03:36 PM IST
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