Lucy

Spooky Eye: The Movie

"She has the Power."

Good afternoon friends, and welcome back to another stirring edition of the Tagline, where movies are still king, or possibly queen as the case might be. Today I will be going back a little bit to talk about the recent Luc Besson film Lucy, a movie that I avoided seeing for a while because I wasn't sure I needed to see Scarlett Johansson hurricanrana another person. As it turned out, I really didn't but she mostly hurts people in different ways, so that was a real relief. Lucy is a movie about a girl, who as you may have guessed is named Lucy. She is kind of a dumbass, For starters, she hangs around with a seedy crowd, including her super awesome boyfriend who essentially sells her as a drug mule so that he can try to get out of a bad debt he owes to some Korean crime boss in Taiwan (where they are). This doesn't really work out great for him or his splattered brains, but he was an asshole anyway so really who cares. Lucy on the other hand... doesn't end up much better off, having her abdomen stuffed full of drugs and then getting kicked in her drug bag, which seems like a dumb plan on the part of her captors. Large amounts of the drug are absorbed by her system, which causes her to freak out and then does what every drug addict dreams about: gives her super powers. Despite her enhanced abilities and telekinesis and other crazy shit, Lucy's body is rapidly deteriorating, and so she attempts to locate the rest of the drug mules so she can juice up some more. Also she contacts well known wise person and maybe god Morgan Freeman so that she can try and figure out a way not to literally disintegrate on an airplane.

Time to sexgun.

Being as this movie is directed by Luc Besson, Lucy's journey is filled with flashy bursts of intense violence, some gunfights, some car chases, it hits all the high notes you'd come to expect from that kind of movie. This is fortunate, because beyond the action, this movie is maybe the most incomprehensible and ridiculous plot Besson has produced (though certainly incoherent in a more entertaining than Insurgent say). Let's start from the beginning of dumb and then make our way gradually from there. The movie relies upon the perennial favorite of science urban legends, the "humans only use 10% of their brain and if they could use more they'd be psionic demi-gods" myth. This isn't the first time a big budget movie has based itself on that, as 2011's Limitless also utilized the "x% of your brain is unused" premise as the basis for its plot, though granted in a probably less stupid way. Of course, any theory, no matter how asinine, sounds more plausible when its being expounded on by Morgan Freeman in front of an audience in an academic looking setting. This is I assume the primary way people figured we'd accept the horseshit happening in Now You See Me.

Who told you I was in Wanted?

I'd like to say that the movie starts with a kind of silly premise but builds on it in a smart way, but that would make me a huge liar, so I'm not going to tell you that. From its dumb premise, the movie piles pseudo science on top of more pseudo science, until you're only vaguely aware of what is supposed to be happening, because it only makes the vaguest kind of sense. The movie also commits one of the absolutely most dire of all cinematic sins: using stock animal footage in any way whatsoever. This movie does it quite a bit too. I'd say maybe a fifth of the movie's run time is stock footage of animals doing stuff. There is essentially never a good excuse for doing this, and I'm sure there was a more elegant way to express whatever sentiments they were trying to get across with pictures of two lions humping or whatever.

She can see the code of the matrix or something,

On top of these missteps, this film also suffers to some degree from Equilibrium Syndrome. This is to say, Lucy becomes a super powered killer person, who is less and less human, and also essentially unstoppable by any force on the Earth. While it's cool to watch her beat dudes up and later to just knock them out with her spooky mind powers, you end up losing most, if not all of your suspense and tension. The movie admittedly tries to stave this off by implying that Lucy is just going to disappear in a poof of smoke if she can't figure out some way not to, but even then her super perfect mental faculties make the chances of that outcome remote as well. All powerful characters can be fun, but they don't usually make for compelling protagonists, especially if one of their quirks is "loses their humanity and essentially becomes a robot".

Now I've taken a lot of digs at this movie, but it wasn't a movie that I hated while I was watching it. Rather as I thought about it afterwards, more and more ridiculous details became apparent (I mean most of them are so blatant that it was obvious even as I was watching that this was a super stupid movie). Still the sharp camera work and action sequences made this movie (which is only an hour and a half long) tolerable during its run time. Except for the stock animal footage, what the fuck. I'd say if you haven't seen this yet, you can go ahead and skip it. Go watch Nikita or something instead.

That's it for today! Join me again next week for Furious shit.