noirmayhem
Since: Mar, 2015
03/18/2015 00:00:00
Well, Lucy really isn't an action movie, despite what the trailers would have had you believe.
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Cool action movie with no tension
Lucy contains many of Luc Besson's signature motifs: slow motion, guns, slow motion guns, opera music, and an Action Girl protagonist. Like many of his previous movies, this is a film that thrives on Rule of Cool alone. However, unlike his other films, Rule of Cool becomes this film's biggest hindrance.
The story of Lucy is that Lucy, an American student living in Taipei, is forced to be a drug mule for an organized crime syndicate. The drug is a nootropic (a drug that makes you smarter), and Lucy is forced to take it to Europe in her stomach. Or that's what would have happened if a rather helpful gentleman didn't kick her in the stomach, fast-tracking her to full Reality Warper status.
From there Lucy must hunt down the other three drug mules because she now needs this drug to survive. Sounds like an interesting action flick right?
Well this movie has action, but it has one thing missing that makes that action exciting: tension. Lucy is by far the most invincible protagonist I've ever seen in a movie. NOTHING can stop her, and her powers are pretty much limitless. She hit the tilde key at the 20 minute mark and uses God-mode for the rest of the film's running time. And here lies the issue I had with this movie.
As any gamer knows, God-mode gets boring pretty quick. Yeah at first its pretty fun to run around Skyrim, blasting Thalmor patrols away with limitless fireballs. But if there's no tension in that, if there's no chance of failure, it becomes exploding elves on your computer monitor and nothing else. The same unfortunately happens in this movie. The action is great, but there's no reason to care. Lucy is an interesting character and a strong female action hero, but there's no reason to care about what happens to her because nothing will happen to her. There is the basic conflict of Lucy retrieving the drugs, but if Hero X can just snap her fingers and kill all of Villain Y's mooks and casually saunter up and get the Macguffin, it isn't really a conflict.
The end of this movie is pretty cool, and I won't spoil it. Let's just say Besson took a few pages out of Lovecraft towards the end. If you like trippy Sci-Fi visuals you'll feel right at home towards the end. Ultimately Lucy has everything that a good action movie needs except the backbone of the genre itself: conflict. And it suffers because of this.