The first ten minutes of
Lucy, Luc Besson's absolutely berserk new film, will likely reveal your patience for this insane, fever dream mash-up of metaphysical blather and grand spectacle. We meet American party girl Lucy (Scarlett Johansson), a blonde tart studying abroad in Taipei, and she's being courted (and then some) to courier a briefcase of unknown contents by her sketchy beau-of-the-week. She does so, delivering this package to the unrepentantly evil Mr. Jang (Min-sik Choi, the original
Oldboy.) For an action movie it seems like a fairly standard set-up, like a generic variant of
Taken (another Besson property.) To no surprise, the briefcase contains drugs and Lucy, against her will, becomes a mule carrying the mysterious CPH4, which has been sewn into her abdomen. The drug leaks and Lucy turns into a god-like creature with the ability to use more than 10% of her brain capacity. She literary becomes the girl with kaleidoscope eyes. With me so far?
But there's stranger things afoot. For starters, Besson's cuts the first sequence with nature footage of wildlife animals luring and attacking their prey. What is this movie? When Lucy is offered cash, we cut to a shot of mouse nearing its trap. Lucy never had a chance from the start, but
Lucy is something else entirely-- a nutty exercise in style, one that abandons its generic action film traits nearly as quickly as it establishes them, unleashing a beast of movie, one that if isn't exactly smart, is certainly alluring in its confidence. Maddening and mined with pseudo-science that might make Neil deGrasse Tyson's head explode,
Lucy is strangely exhilarating and nearly unfathomably weird. Besson throws imagery and madcap violence with such reckless abandon; he's genre bursting to such a heightened degree that
Lucy plays like
The Tree of Life meets
Looney Tunes.
