Too Dumb to Be Smart

Luc Besson makes weird movies. I almost said that he made very French movies, and sometimes he does, but I think more than just him being French, and being influenced by French cinema, it's important to highlight just how weird his films can be. Although he started with smaller films that did fairly well at the Box Office (when you compare cost to return, anyway), he really struck the big time with The Fifth Element. That film is a big, bombastic, and quite silly sci-fi adventure, one that manages to take the stock Die HardThe 1980s were famous for the bombastic action films released during the decade. Featuring big burly men fighting other big burly men, often with more guns, bombs, and explosions than appear in Michael Bay's wildest dreams, the action films of the decade were heavy on spectacle, short on realism. And then came a little film called Die Hard that flipped the entire action genre on its head. template and mold it into something new and very weird. From that point on, weirdness became the order of the day for the director.

From the Fifth Element was had the strange an uneven The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc, a trio of animated Arthur films, the fantasy Angel-A, and then, eventually, Lucy. The most grounded movie he made in that time period is the first Taken film, and that's hardly a model for deep, consequential film making. I would say that Lucy was the nadir for his weirdness, but then he went and made the absolute Box Office bomb, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, which was even weirder. At least Lucy made a stupid amount of money.

The film stars Scarlett Johansson as the titular Lucy Miller. Studying abroad, in Taipei, Taiwan, Lucy is in a relationship with Richard (Pilou Asbaek), a rather sketchy dude that Lucy can hardly say no to. She does try to say no, though, when Richard asks her to take a briefcase in, as a delivery, to a hotel. Lucy find the whole thing weird, but Richard keeps insisting. Eventually he handcuffs the case to her wrist so she has to go in, which she does, but this isn't the easy delivery he promised. For one, Richard soon after is killed. And then Lucy is grabbed up and taken up to the suit of Mr. Jang (Choi Min-sik).

Jang is a bad dude. He kills without a thought, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake. The case that Lucy brings him contains synthetic, crystallized CPH4 (an enzyme that pregnant women produce, in tiny quantities, to help their babies develop). Jang, and his associates, hope to turn CPH4 into the next big party drug. The turn Lucy (along with three other men) into unwilling drug mules implanting the packets of CPH4 into their guts. Lucy's, though, quickly begins to leak, dumping the CPH4 into her system. And that's when, as the film puts it, she taps into the full potential of her brain (and not just the 10 percent humans supposedly use) and becomes a superhero. More or less.

Lucy is, without a doubt, a deeply strange and stupid movie. It's entire concept is predicated on the debunked myth that "humans only use 10 percent of their brain." That is not true, in any form. Humans actively (as per CT scans) use 10 to 20 percents of their brain at any one time, but the zones that are active shift and change depending on what is being done. And that's active use, ignoring all the passive functions the brain controls constantly. Someone has to be really dumb to actually accept the idea that the human body would develop a giant meat sack and not use every inch of it. If we didn't need it, as per evolution, we wouldn't have it.

The film buys in fully on the idea that humans really do have 90 percent of their muscle pudding up top going unused. The idea is that, because Lucy gets more of this weird embryonic chemical in her system (a factoid raised and then ignored for the rest of the film) she can somehow tap into more and more of her brain at once. The first thing that happens is that she's suddenly able to control her whole body. Every inch, every cell. If she were actually able to do that, she'd likely die because every iota of her perception would be taken up trying to keep her cells functioning, her body digesting, her blood pumping, her lungs working, and her skin healing (among other functions). She'd forget something, her lungs would fill with fluid, she'd choke on her own blood, and then die. Roll credits.

From there, though, the film then goes off into a flight of fancy and gets exceptionally stupid. Above 30 percent she starts being able to control others, learns to control electrical signals, begins peering through time and space. The film approaches 2001: A Space Odyssey levels of transcendental weirdness, just predicated on a really stupid idea, and without any grace or intelligence to it at all. This is the kind of movie that absolutely demands you turn off your brain and just accept the concept at face value, but you can't. This is based on a debunked idea so stupid, so basic, that accepting it can't be done. It just can't.

Thing is, though, when the film isn't harping on the whole, "such-and-such amount of brain capacity," it does manage to become something pretty watchable. The times where Lucy just gains super powers and then goes off to act like a bad ass are pretty cool. If the film didn't try to explain itself with bad pseudo-science and was just "this is a drug that will make you smarter, but use it sparingly," and then had Lucy get poisoned with it and go all super-aggro, it would have worked. All the dumb ideas the film has would work if it didn't try to ground itself on the dumbest idea possible. That one flaw ruins what is otherwise a gloriously cheesy superhero film.

The film does one thing right: it invests in the idea that Scarlett Johansson is cool and can kick a lot of ass. She's already proven that was the case with her role as Black WidowNatalia Romanova was one one of the greatest and most effective Russian spies, a deadly killer who could blend in anywhere. Then she was turned and became one of SHIELD's most effective, and trusted, agents. in the Marvel Cinematic UniverseWhen it first began in 2008 with a little film called Iron Man no one suspected the empire that would follow. Superhero movies in the past, especially those not featuring either Batman or Superman, were usually terrible. And yet, Iron Man would lead to a long series of successful films, launching the most successful cinema brand in history: the Marvel Cinematic Universe.. Before she managed to get her own solo film in that franchise, with the (somehow even more terrible) Black Widow, she got to do her solo superhero thing in Lucy and she's great. Whenever the film is smart enough to get out of her way so she can carry the film, the movie smooths out and is absolutely watchable. She is the heart and soul of this film and, likely, is the only reason it managed to make $463 Mil at the Box Office (on a budget of only $40 Mil, no less).

But then the film just has to cut over to Professor Samuel Norman (Morgan Freeman), talking about brain capacity and how little humans use. That's when the film grinds to a halt. Make no mistake, Freeman can see this terrible dialogue with a smooth clip, reading it like it's Shakespeare, but even that doesn't sell the words coming out of his mouth. The film has to explain itself, time and again, and any time spent away from Lucy and her weird and wild adventure is just wasted time in this film. We don't need it, we need Lucy.

Lucy works when it's just the Scarlett Johansson show. Her kicking ass as a superhero is infinitely watchable (or, at least it was, back before Black Widow). This movie knew it and used her for all she was worth. It's fun, stupid, and deeply silly, but it just about works most of the time. It's only when the dumb pseudo-science comes in that the film (regularly, frequently) flies off the rails. Your enjoyment with the movie with directly align with how well you can ignore all the dumb shit being said while ScarJo goes off and kicks ass. If you can do that hard enough you'll likely enjoy Lucy. But that's hard, and I don't blame you if you turn off this film part way in.