Lucy Review

Back in 2011, there was a movie called Limitless that was released. The basic premise was that a guy takes a pill that allows him to access 100 percent of his brain. Personally I thought the movie was dumb. Interesting premise, but poorly executed with a rather lame message that it left the audience with. While I'm not here to review that movie, I bring it up because I am almost certain that Luc Besson watched that movie and said to himself, "What if I were to make a movie that uses that exact same premise, but instead turn it into an insane and crazy action-thriller?" Because, seriously, that's exactly what Lucy is. Limitless on steroids. Turns out this worked out quite well. Not only is Lucy on pace to demolish Limitless in terms of box office numbers, but in my personal opinion, Lucy is a much better movie. Crazy, insane, and weird, yes. But I walked out with a positive feeling towards the movie as opposed to the negative feeling I got with Limitless.

As mentioned, the whole premise of this movie centers around the idea that humans can only achieve 10 percent of their brain capacity. Then we throw out the idea of what would happen if the full 100 percent could be achieved. Is this an accurate theory? Can humans only achieve 10 percent of their brain capacity? I don't know. In discussing this topic, I've talked to several people that will tell me this is completely false. But is it? I think of the capacity of my brain and I will fully admit that there are a lot of things my brain can't do. And not trying to make this a religious discussion, but if try to think of perfect capacity, I think of God's brain. There's definitely a huge difference between my brain and God's brain and I don't think anyone would argue with that. So whatever scientific term you want to use to explain that difference, that's what this movie touches on. Not that this is a religious movie. It's not. But that's what I thought of as Lucy slowly gained more and more brain capacity and thus gained more and more abilities.

But let's not kid ourselves here. Whatever stance you take on the brain capacity issue that I just talked about shouldn't really matter. This is not trying to be a realistic movie at all. This is a movie that is taking an interesting concept and turning it into a high octane thriller. And by goodness does this movie take you on quite the wild ride. And not all of it is good. In fact, the beginning of this movie was a bit much. First off, it was really odd. Right at the beginning Lucy gets thrown into this awful situation by her idiot boyfriend where she is being chased by a bunch of Chinese people trying to catch her because of this suitcase that her boyfriend handcuffed to her arm. While this is happening, we get parallel shots of a cheetah chasing down an impala. What? I mean, I understood the parallel perfectly, but I had no idea why it was happening. And this kept happening throughout the first part of the movie. In addition to that, this got really gross rather quickly. If you have a weak stomach, this may be a movie to skip.

Once we get through the crazy beginning, though, we get to the whole reason why I went to see this movie in the first place. Scarlett Johannson kicking trash. Scarlett Jo has been a favorite actress of mine for quite some time, but she climbed way up high on the awesome ladder after her epic performance as Black Widow in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Just so happens that the timing of this movie is brilliant because I was totally ready for more epic Scarlett Jo after that and boom! This movie came along just a few short months after. And let me tell you, she is brilliant. She's good as normal Scarlett Jo, but then once her character Lucy gets drugged, she starts turning into Black Widow and becomes totally awesome. Then things escalate even more and she starts becoming not just Black Widow, but a combination of pretty much every Marvel character you can think of. When she's at this stage, a lot of crazy, weird, absurd things happen because she is able to do like anything she wants. This made things slightly less tense because you know that none of the crazy Chinese people chasing her has any shot of stopping her, but to me it was pretty fun to witness because, like I said, Scarlett Jo is a boss and watching her kick everyone's trash is pure entertainment.

I was nervous about the final act of this movie because Limitless crashed and died with the final act and I was afraid that this would do the same thing. But it didn't. In fact, when the end credits rolled around, I was in awe. Sure the conclusions of this movie were like the rest of this movie: completely absurd and ridiculous. This is Luc Besson. What'd you expect? But in my opinion it was also super epic. Of course I'm not going to even think about diving into specifics. I want to leave that a surprise. Just know that I enjoyed the ending and if you want to talk to me in person about it, I would be more than willing to oblige. So overall, Lucy was a super crazy and super weird movie. It was completely unrealistic and very absurd. But it was the type of crazy, weird, unrealistic and absurd that I found myself enjoying for some weird reason. I'll admit that it's not for everyone, especially because it gets overly gross and violent at times, but if you consider yourself a special type of crazy like myself, you might enjoy your time seeing it. I give Lucy an 8/10.