Film White Lady Slaughters Asian Men for Not Speaking English
Essentially all I have to say is in the title. It's always nice to see more strong female protags in media, especially in something so hyped as Lucy. The thing is, this movie is a racist piece of garbage that reminds me of Hillary Clinton in all those special ways.
First of all, why did they even set this movie in Taiwan. What was the reason for that? Taiwan has no outstanding crime thingies. And even if it did, our homegrown U.S. has a lot more variety for the writers to choose from, without writing around her being in Taiwan. It's pretty obvious that they just wanted an "exotic" background for the whole thing, which dehumanises actual, real life Taiwanese. (This is further evidenced by the scary asian writing behind her during that one part in the movie where shes in the chair and the eeeevil asian!!! druglord is talking to the poor defenseless white woman etc. the words behind her translate into such terrifying words like "Apple".)
Also she literally kills a Taiwanese cabbie for not speaking English. In Taiwan. This is shown as a Really Cool Demonstration of the Strong Female Character. (its raciiiiiiist)
Second of all, what the fuck we don't only use 10% of our brains oh my god nobody thinks that everybody has proven that wrong oh my gooooood.
Also, what the guy below me said about invincibility being boring. I was really bored through the whole movie and I forgot why, but you made me remember. Thanks.
Film 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.
Film Lazy
So Besson wanted to rehash The Professional. He also wanted to make a transcendent movie about a Buddha-like character. He was not able to mix those two movies together and there is a sequence of events when this becomes evident.
This is not a big spoiler, since it happens in the earlier portions of the movie, but, you know, spoiler warning.
-Lucy becomes trans human, this is codified, presumably, through her cold logical action of killing the non-English speaking cab driver for expediency and to, I assume, leave no witnesses near the place where they were keeping her kidnapped.
-Lucy finds the villain, first killing all his mooks thanks to her meta human abilities, and then, also using her abilities, she extracts information from said villain. Once the villain is made aware that she has the info and also, obviously, about Lucy herself, super intelligent Lucy does not dispose of the villain.
And there, the movie breaks. One can't even say that everything that happens after that point is Lucy's fault. I mean, from the internal logic of the movie it is her fault, but it's so badly done, her sparing the villain is so unjustified for the type of character Lucy has become by that point, that one can only say its the plot's fault. It's a villainous plot tumor that prevents any healthy development from then on.
Lucy is not prevented from killing the villain early by any external force out of her control. She is prevented from making use of her cold logic and super intelligence by the filmmaker's laziness, they just didn't want to think up some bigger and better conflict. And that's this movies biggest fault, laziness.
Film Indecisive, unimaginative, and paradoxically unambitious
Lucy is one of those films that starts off with an interesting concept, but instead of building upon that strong start, decides to narratively cripple itself.
Overall, the problem lies in its inability to focus on a single subject and maintain a consistent tone: is it a crime film with a superbeing involved, a superhero/sci-fi film with crime elements along for the ride, or a sci-fi/philosophical film with a crime film and a superhero film clinging to it like barnacles? Does it want to be a ridiculously over-the-top action film in which Korean gangsters somehow bring rocket launchers into Parisian police stations, or does it want to be a serious, mature look at human evolution? The film can't make its mind up, and so it succeeds at being none of these things - not helped by the fact that the narrative flow is interrupted by clumsy expository lectures by Morgan Freeman, slowing down the story and muddying the tone even further.
Academy Award winner Scarlett Johansen spends most of the film speaking in a bland monotone and acting as if nothing surprises her. Post-drugburst, she has exactly two moments where she really gets to act and express emotion, and while these scenes number among some of the best in the entire movie (the phone call to her mother and her near-disintegration), once they're done, she's back to being a distant, unrelatable superbeing - to the point that things like seeing all of time and space and transcending reality itself barely stir the subtlest of emotions.
Meanwhile, Big Bad Mr Jang is an intimidating presence, but the trouble is, he's Starter Villain material: once Lucy begins ascending, she is so far beyond him that it becomes comical, meaning that any tension evaporates instantly. There's no attempt to level him up or replace him with a deadlier villain - just more of the same thing. I've heard this film compared to Akira, but in all honesty, the comparison would only work if Tetsuo remained pitted against the clown gang for all six volumes without ever upping the stakes.
Last but not least, the progression of Lucy's powers is not only depressingly undervalued by the film, but really boring to see in action up until the very end: she barely has a chance to show off any of them before being hurried off to the climax – another casualty of all the time wasted on lectures and Jang – and her big telekinesis demonstration has all the drama sucked out of it by the impotent villains.
The most interesting power on display is shapeshifting - partly because I'm a sucker for shapeshifting, but mostly because the hand-warping scene really shows off how creative the story could have been if it had a tiny bit of focus.
All in all, this film is where potential went to die. The soundtrack's nice, and there's a few really good scenes buried amidst the dross, but it otherwise raises little more than an almighty "meh."