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"Lucy" by Luc Besson: Film Review

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Published: Jul 17, 2018

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Works Cited:

Bayley, D. H. (1994). Police for the future. Oxford University Press.
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National Institute of Justice. (2015). Understanding property crime. Retrieved from https://www.nij.gov/topics/crime/property-crime/Pages/welcome.aspx
National Police Foundation. (2017). Police corruption: An analytical look into police ethics. Retrieved from https://www.policefoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/An-Analytical-Look-into-Police-Ethics.pdf
O’Reilly, T. (2016). Security camera system design and implementation for industrial and commercial applications. Wiley.
Pease, K. (1998). Repeat victimization. Criminal Justice Press.
Rosenbaum, D. P., & Lurigio, A. J. (1994). Crime and the economy. Sage Publications.
Smith, D. A., & Jarjoura, G. R. (1988). Social structure and criminal victimization. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 25(1), 27-52.
Wilson, J. Q., & Kelling, G. L. (1982). Broken windows: The police and neighborhood safety. The Atlantic Monthly, 249(3), 29-38.

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Lucy review – Luc Besson's cerebral sci-fi is set to overload

Peter Parker had his radioactive spider and the Fantastic Four their gamma rays. For Lucy (Scarlett Johansson), the imperilled heroine of Luc Besson's sleek, punchy action caper, superpower comes courtesy of a packet of prototype narcotics that ruptures in her intestine, allowing her to access an extra 90% of her cerebral capacity. Before long, Lucy is an unblinking angel of vengeance, alive to each revolution of the planet and driving hell for leather down the boulevards of Paris. She's like a blend of Marilyn Monroe and the Terminator, as scripted by Ayn Rand.

All of which proves rollickingly entertaining – up to a point. Besson delivers the thrills with aplomb, while Johansson looks to be relishing a role that stands as a kind of populist cousin to her recent, electrifying performance in Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin . The problem is that the greater Lucy grows, and the more brain power she colonises, the more the plot risks bursting its bounds and blowing out its levels. What breed of monster has Besson created here? Snickering drug dealers are no match for Lucy. The movie itself can barely contain her. Lucy is hopping across millennia; she has her sights set on the cosmos. At the rate she's going, she should reach the outer edge of the galaxy in about 90 minutes flat.

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Lucy, film review: Scarlett Johansson will blow your mind in Luc Besson's complex thriller

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Loaded weapon: drugs have surprise side effects for Scarlett Johansson in Luc Besson's 'Lucy'

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A decade ago, Luc Besson seemed burned out as a film-maker. There was talk of his retirement. The director of Nikita and Léon was reduced to making animated features (the wretched Arthur and the Invisibles) and to overseeing the growth of his company EuropaCorp, a French version of a Hollywood studio that combines sales and distribution with production.

It would be overstating it to suggest that Besson is enjoying a major creative renaissance but Lucy is the best film he has made in a very long time. This is a movie that perfectly illustrates what makes him such a distinctive and infuriating director. Besson combines bravura imagery and ingenious ideas with large dollops of Gallic kitsch and silliness. His attempts at profundity are continually undermined by an infantile desire to throw in slapstick and action sequences for their own sake. What can't be denied is the brilliance of the execution. Lucy, partly shot in Imax, deserves to be seen on the biggest screen possible.

Helped by the cinematographer Thierry Arbogast and by the virtuosity of the special effects technicians at Industrial Light and Magic, the veteran French director has delivered a film that really does induce the same sense of wonder that was found in the silent era in Georges Méliès' fantastical shorts.

The key concept here – promoted relentlessly in the marketing that always accompanies Besson films – is that average humans only use 10 per cent of their brain capacity. In order to demonstrate how somebody would function using the full might of their noggin, Besson devises an incredibly convoluted and complex thriller plot. Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) is an American student living a riotous life in Taipei. Her ex-boyfriend persuades her to deliver a mysterious package to a businessman in an upmarket hotel. This package contains a synthetic drug called CPH4 that has mind-bending and enlarging properties. The businessman, really a gangster, forces Lucy and some other unfortunate Europeans to act as drug mules. She has a pouch of the stuff inserted in her guts. When this pouch bursts, she suddenly develops superhuman mental powers.

Having played an alien in Under the Skin and voiced a computer operating system in Her, Johansson is developing a reputation as an utterly fearless actress. She is ready to take roles that more timid Hollywood stars would recoil from instinctively. Lucy allows her to combine two sides of her screen persona: the oddball visionary and the action heroine familiar from Avengers Assemble. Johansson always keeps her poise. She also has an ironic detachment, as if she is at a slight remove from her character. Whether she is instructing a doctor how to remove drugs from her abdomen or using her telepathic powers to make her gun-toting gangster adversaries stick to the ceiling, she is strictly matter of fact in her manner. She helps anchor a film that might otherwise have seemed preposterous.

There are scenes in Lucy which are strangely moving, in which Besson briefly moves away from his kinetic, comic book-style storytelling. We hear the heroine reminiscing about moments in her earliest childhood that she could not possibly remember without the CPH4. As her powers increase, so does the inevitability of her demise – or, at least, that of her body. She can perceive things that she would rather ignore, ranging from her mortality to the potential health problems that her flatmate faces unless she changes her lifestyle.

Between the action scenes, there are also time-outs for philosophising about the nature of time, matter and perception. Lucy's sounding board is Professor Samuel Norman (Morgan Freeman), an academic whose area of research is precisely the untapped possibilities of the human mind. Freeman plays the role in just the way you would expect – with a solemn and dignified gravitas.

Lucy: Film stills

Besson borrows ideas and motifs from countless other films, including some of his own. The scene in which Lucy pinions a gangster boss to his chair by sticking blades through his hands owes an obvious debt to the extreme Asian thrillers made by Takashi Miike or Park Chan-wook. The more lyrical, metaphysical moments can't help but invoke memories of Terrence Malick movies such as The Tree of Life. Then, there are the outrageously silly sequences – most notably, a car chase through Paris in which Lucy drives like a maniac – that are in the spirit of Besson's own earlier films.

There is a sense that the screenplay is a puzzle that Besson himself has only partly worked out. He hasn't managed to introduce any meaningful romantic sub-plot. It is clear that the hard-bitten Paris cop chief (played by Egyptian actor Amr Waked) is besotted with Lucy. However, she is so far ahead of him intellectually, and he is so busy keeping Korean gangsters at bay, that there is no time for them to make anything other than the most cursory small talk.

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Lucy may not make sense but it is refreshing to see Besson working at full throttle. The film has an energy and visual inventiveness that was almost entirely lacking in his last feature as a director, The Family, a lazy comedy-thriller in which an ageing mob boss (played by Robert De Niro) hides out in provincial France.

A French director tilting at an international audience, Besson himself often appears to be caught between different cultures and film-making styles. That confusion is reflected in Lucy but is part of the film's richness. From his thriller Nikita (1990) early in his career to The Lady (2011), his biopic of Burmese political leader Aung San Suu Kyi, Besson has often made films about strong and defiant female characters. Lucy may be confused and eccentric but it is stylish, provocative film-making. As an action movie with ideas, it is also a welcome antidote to the mindless, testosterone-driven fare – such as The Expendables – that has been clogging up screens this summer.

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REVIEW: I Love <i>Lucy</i> — and Luc, and Scarlett

REVIEW: I Love Lucy — and Luc, and Scarlett

Correction appended, July 29, 2014

It’s a fallacy, long rebuffed by science, that humans use only about 10% of their brainpower . But it is true about most summer movies. Pouring their wizardry into special effects and well-choreographed fights, warm-weather action films rarely challenge the viewer with grand notions or beautifully baffling imagery. Viewers who invest two hours in a superhero movie often leave feeling entertained but somehow dumber.

Luc Besson’s Lucy is here to the rescue. The French writer-director-producer’s new movie, about a woman empowered and imperiled by the explosion of a powerful new drug in her nervous system, kicks ass and takes brains. Besson creates a heroine whose rapidly expanding abilities make her the world’s most awesome weapon. In the process, he promotes Scarlett Johansson from an indie-film icon and Marvel-universe sidekick to the movie superwoman she was destined to be. Taking place in less than a day — and synopsizing 3 million years of human evolution in a hurtling 82 min. of screen time — Lucy tops its only competition, Tom Cruise and Doug Liman’s underappreciated Edge of Tomorrow , as the summer’s coolest, juiciest, smartest action movie.

(READ: Corliss’s review of Edge of Tomorrow )

The cleverness in Besson’s film isn’t in its pseudoscience premise — that Johansson’s Lucy is transformed from a clueless American grad student to a genius and martial arts adept as her brain-use percentage skyrockets from 10% to 100%. No, it’s in showing that from great power can come both genetic transformation and personal tragedy. While Marvel heroes live on in countless remakes and reboots, Lucy may not survive the toxic drug that makes her unique. But it does give her a glimpse of the big cosmic picture. “Life was given to us a billion years ago,” she says in a voice-over at the film’s beginning. “What have we done with it?” By the end, she’ll show you.

Rated R for its dollops of violence, this female-glorifying picture not only shames all PG-13-rated summer spectacles for their wimpitude but also lures the audience into accompanying it on a third-act trip of ambitious movie madness. It begins with a vision of the first known hominid, the 3 million-year-old female discovered in Ethiopia in 1974 and nicknamed Lucy, then bombards you with allusive montages (say, of various species copulating) and the intricate drizzle of computer algorithms, and ultimately spirals into transcendent, Kubrickian speculation, all while satisfying the basic movie appetite for twists and thrills.

(FIND: 2001: A Space Odyssey on the updated all-TIME 100 Movies list )

In Taipei, Lucy’s scuzzy friend Richard (Pilou Asbaek) saddles her with a locked briefcase to be delivered to the mysterious Mr. Jang (Choi Min-sik, the Korean star of Oldboy and I Saw the Devil ). In a hotel lobby, Richard is shot dead, while five Asian heavyweights strong-arm Lucy up to Jang’s corpse-littered suite. Rinsing the blood from a few recent murders off his hands, Jang orders her to open the briefcase. It contains four packets of a blue powder, called CPH4; it is, as Jang’s English-speaking aide (Julian Rhind-Tutt) notes, “a drug the kids in Europe are gonna enjoy.”

Lucy is sedated and wakes up with an abdomen scar; her belly has been sliced open to contain one of the four packets. She and three other unfortunates will be muling the drug to European capitals, spurring addiction, death and chaos … unless — there’s always an unless — Lucy can harness her gigabyte brain waves in the few hours she is told she has left to live.

(READ: Did Oldboy inspire the Virginia Tech shootings? )

A sadistic prison guard’s kick to Lucy’s stomach triggers the effects of the CPH4. With her brain power now at 20% (the rising numbers are flashed onscreen like intermittent basketball scores), she overpowers the guard, kills him and takes his gun, walks into the prison kitchen, kills the four guys there, steals one of their jackets to cover the blood stain on her shirt, goes outside, shoots a cabbie who doesn’t quickly enough hop to her request for a ride, takes another cab to the hospital, where she strides into an operating room and, to persuade the doctors of their need for speed in her case, shoots the patient on the surgical table. (A quick scan of the patient’s X-rays tells her he wasn’t going to live anyway.) All this, which would be a long set piece in any other movie, takes about 4 min. Besson is in as much of a hurry as Lucy is.

In a Paris lecture hall, Professor Samuel Norman (Morgan Freeman) is spouting the 10% theory: that full use of our mental capacity can allow the earth’s creatures “to go from evolution to revolution.” (He must have just seen Dawn of the Planet of the Apes .) Norman also teaches that humans seek to continue the species either by reproduction or immortality. Lucy had the second option thrust upon her. Before flying to Paris for urgent consultation with Norman, she visits Jang, pinioning his hands to his chair arms with two knife blades and calmly explaining, “Learning is always a painful process.” It is for her: on the plane from Taipei, her cells start breaking up, flying around her. The perfect machine she’s become may be disintegrating.

(READ: The genius chimps in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes )

She spends the rest of the movie in Paris, battling a couple dozen of Jang’s thugs and trying to cope with or accept her potent, poignant new condition. At first delighted by her burgeoning skills and acuity, she soon realizes, by Googling the available literature at supercomputer swiftness, that she can’t control her new power — that “all things human are fading away.” She could be Dr. Jekyll turned into a destructive, nearly indestructible Mr. Hyde; or the scientist, played by Jeff Goldblum in David Cronenberg’s 1986 The Fly , who tries to understand his unique metamorphosis even as he succumbs to it. Similarly, superwoman Lucy wants to hold on to her humanity. In Paris, she abruptly kisses the detective (Amr Waked) assigned to her. “Why’d you do that?” he asks, and she replies, “A reminder” — of what human emotion feels like.

(FIND: The Fly on the all-TIME Top 25 Horror Movies list )

Once in a while, Lucy indulges in the inane conventions of summer action films. How is it that, in Taipei, Lucy can read Jang’s mind (to discover the identities and itineraries of the drug mules sent to Berlin, Rome and Paris), yet on a Paris street she doesn’t notice that her nemesis is 10 feet away? Because it’s a movie! And why, when she’s in a rush to meet the professor, does she insist on driving the wrong way on a one-way highway? Because it’s a Luc Besson movie; most of the films he’s produced, including the Taxi , Transporter and Taken franchises, are full of car chases and crashes.

Another of the Frenchman’s fancies: making action pictures about women. In La Femme Nikita , Anne Parillaud is trained as an assassin. In The Professional , 12-year-old Natalie Portman helped hit man Jean Reno fulfill a contract. The Fifth Element , the filmmaker’s biggest Stateside hit, paired taxi driver Bruce Willis with the galaxy’s most ideal specimen, or speciwoman, Milla Jovovich. He also directed biopics of history’s favorite insurgent heroines, Joan of Arc ( The Messenger ) and Aung San Suu Kyi ( The Lady ). Besson must figure that a gender comprising more than half the world’s human population deserves to be represented playing at least 10% of the lead characters in action films. It’d be fine with me if Hollywood followed Besson’s lead and upped the ratio to Lucy level.

(READ: Michelle Yeoh plays Aung San Suu Kyi in Luc Besson’s The Lady )

In a role originally proposed to Angelina Jolie, Johansson grows from grad-student tearfulness to appropriate a good deal of Jolie’s glowering majesty, and to show all appropriate stages along the way. In the recent British film Under the Skin , Johansson played an alien creature that soullessly seduces human males and harvests their meat. And in Spike Jonze’s her she was the more-human-than-human voice of Joaquin Phoenix’s operating system. Besson’s film restores Johansson’s humanity even as it may slip away from Lucy. The longest single shot is of a phone call Lucy makes from Taipei to her kindly, concerned mother (Laura D’Arista) back in the States. Tears flow from the actress’s right eye, as if Lucy is being drained of all the emotion she has felt and will ever feel, and is weeping for the loss.

(READ: Corliss on Scarlett Johansson in Under the Skin )

But don’t weep for Lucy. Just keep track of her strange attributes: the sprouting of extra hands and gooey tentacles. Wonder at her lightning travels across space (she stands in Times Square as humanity zooms around her at a Koyaanisqatsi tempo) and time (when the oldest Lucy and the newest touch fingers in a Sistine Chapel–ceiling moment). And be appreciative that, toward the end of a summer with a lot of meh action epics, one film has shown how the genre can accommodate a crazy-great movie. Thank you, Scarlett, Luc and Lucy .

Correction: The original version of this story misstated the name of Morgan Freeman’s character. It is Samuel Norman. The story also misspelled Milla Jovovich’s name.

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A woman, accidentally caught in a dark deal, turns the tables on her captors and transforms into a merciless warrior evolved beyond human logic.
It was supposed to be a simple job. All Lucy had to do was deliver a mysterious briefcase to Mr. Jang. But immediately Lucy is caught up in a nightmarish deal where she is captured and turned into a drug mule for a new and powerful synthetic drug. When the bag she is carrying inside of her stomach leaks, Lucy's body undergoes unimaginable changes that begins to unlock her mind's full potential. With her new-found powers, Lucy turns into a merciless warrior intent on getting back at her captors. She receives invaluable help from Professor Norman, the leading authority on the human mind, and French police captain Pierre Del Rio. — LeiaSolo
The American Lucy is studying in Taiwan and is dating Richard that she met at a nightclub. When Richard has a briefcase to deliver to the mysterious Korean Mr. Jang, he tricks Lucy and cuffs her to the briefcase. Lucy has no other option but to meet Mr. Jang, who is a dangerous drug lord that kills Richard. Lucy discovers that the briefcase contains the synthetic drug CPH4 and she is forced to work to Mr. Jang as drug mule with three other men and transport the drug to Europe hidden in their abdomens. However one of her captors kicks her in the abdomen and releases the CPH4 in her body. Soon Lucy enhances her brain capacity and develops her physical and mental capabilities. She uses her abilities to kill the criminals and flees. However her power does not stop increasing and is destroying Lucy that needs to use more CPH4 to stabilize her body. She contacts Professor Norman, who is an authority in brain capacity, and the scientist becomes her hope to save her. But Mr. Jang wants to retrieve his drug and is hunting Lucy down. — Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Lucy is a smart, college student who finds herself in a horrific drug and human trafficking situation where her brain is permanently altered by an illegal new drug that gets accidentally ingested during her captivity. When she gets a kick to her abdomen, the drug starts to leak into her body, and she begins using more than 10% of her brain and finds that she has less than 24-48 hours to live. She finds the one neuro-scientist and professor who can help capture her super brain phenomenon for the world, before the villains kill her in the process.
Unlucky Lucy, a twenty-four-year-old American student in Taipei, finds herself coerced into working as a drug mule for Taiwan's most dangerous man: the powerful Korean drug lord, Mr Jang. Having no other choice, Lucy is unwillingly subjected to a quick operation, where a synthetic, highly experimental drug is implanted inside her lower abdomen to transport it in Europe. However, when the potent blue chemical leaks into her bloodstream, the lethal dose will initiate a mind-boggling development of her cerebral activity, unlocking extraordinary skills, and unfathomable abilities that extend past the typical 10% of brain use. More and more, Lucy's superpowers grow stronger by the minute; but, no one knows what will happen next. Will Lucy unlock the secrets of the fully operational human mind? — Nick Riganas
Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) is a 25-year-old American woman living and studying in Taipei, Taiwan. She is tricked into working as a drug mule by her new boyfriend, whose employer, Mr. Jang, is a Korean mob boss and drug lord. Lucy delivers a briefcase to Mr. Jang (Choi Min-Sik) containing a highly valuable synthetic drug called CPH4. After seeing her boyfriend shot and killed, she is captured, and a bag of the drug is forcibly sewn into her abdomen and that of three other drug mules who will also transport the drug for sales in Europe. While Lucy is in captivity, one of her captors kicks her in the abdomen, breaking the bag, releasing a large quantity of the drug into her system. As a result, she begins acquiring increasingly enhanced physical and mental capabilities, such as telepathy, telekinesis, mental time travel, and can choose not to feel pain or other discomforts, in addition to other abilities. She kills off her captors and escapes. She is shot in the process but is able to ignore her pain & simply dig the bullet out of her body. Lucy travels to the nearby Tri-Service General Hospital to get the bag of drugs removed from her abdomen. By this time, she has the ability to hear nearby conversations & knows all languages. The bag is successfully removed, and Lucy is told by the operating doctor of the volatile nature of the drug, based on a substance given to fetuses during prenatal development, and its destructive side-effects. Sensing her growing physical and mental abilities, Lucy returns to Mr. Jang's hotel, kills his bodyguards, assaults Mr. Jang, and telepathically extracts the locations of all three drug mules from his brain. At her shared apartment, Lucy begins researching her condition and contacts a well-known scientist and doctor, Professor Samuel Norman (Morgan Freeman), whose research (On the effects of increasing use of brain capacity by animals. He also theorizes about the nature of life having 2 purposes: become immortal or reproduce. Norman hypothesizes that at 20% of brain capacity humans would have control over their own body & at 40% they would have control over other humans.) may be the key to saving her. After Lucy speaks with the professor and provides proof of her developed abilities, she flies to Paris and contacts a local police captain, Pierre Del Rio, to help her find the remaining three packets of the drug. The Taiwan police is looking for Lucy after her stunt at the hospital, so she disguises herself by changing her body shape and structure to avoid detection & by controlling other humans & animals (such as the police drug sniffers). Lucy has deduced that she needs the drug to survive & buy more time & without the drug she would probably die within 24 hrs. During the plane ride she starts to disintegrate as her cells destabilize from consuming a sip of champagne, which made her body inhospitable for cellular reproduction. Only by consuming more CPH4 is she able to prevent her total disintegration. Her powers continue to grow, leaving her able to telepathically incapacitate armed police and members from the Korean drug gang. With the help of Del Rio, Lucy recovers the drug and hurries to meet Professor Norman, with whom she agrees to share everything she now knows, after he points out that the main point of life is to pass on knowledge. Jang and the mob also want the drug and a gunfight ensues with the French police. In the professor's lab, Lucy discusses the nature of time and life and how people's humanity distorts their perceptions. At her urging, she is intravenously injected with the contents of all three remaining bags of CPH4. Her body begins to metamorphose into a black substance, spreading over computers and other objects in the lab, as she transforms these into an unconventionally shaped, next generation supercomputer that will contain all of her enhanced knowledge of the universe. She then begins a space-time journey into the past, eventually reaching the oldest discovered ancestor of mankind, implied to be Lucy, and touches fingertips with her. Meanwhile, back in the lab, after an M136 AT4 anti-tank weapon destroys the door, Mr. Jang enters and points a gun at Lucy's head from behind, intending to kill her. He shoots, but in an instant before the bullet strikes, Lucy reaches 100% of her cerebral capacity and disappears within the space-time continuum, where she explains that everything is connected, and existence is only proven through time. Only her clothes and the oddly shaped black supercomputer are left behind. Del Rio then enters and fatally shoots Mr. Jang. Professor Norman takes a black, monolithic flash drive offered by the advanced supercomputer created by Lucy's body before the machine disintegrates to dust. Del Rio asks Professor Norman where Lucy is, immediately after which, Del Rio's cell phone sounds and he sees a text message: "I AM EVERYWHERE." With an overhead shot, Lucy's voice is heard stating, "Life was given to us a billion years ago. Now you know what to do with it."

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Review by Brian Eggert July 26, 2014

A film dependent on the myth that we use only 10 percent of our brain, and further driven by the notion of unlocking 100 percent of the brain’s potential, Lucy , by writer-director Luc Besson, taps into the possibilities more than Limitless , another story about the same subject, but succeeds only in delivering an emotionless action-thriller that wants to be smarter than it is. In the 1990s, Besson made some great action yarns with The Professional and The Fifth Element , though in recent years, he’s preferred to grandfather the next generation of action directors like Pierre Morel ( Taken ) and Olivier Megaton ( Colombiana ) by producing and often providing the scripts to profitable shoot-em-ups. With Lucy, he returns to the director’s chair for the kind of story to which he’s most attributed. And rather than blowing audiences away, he’s made a confounding picture that either explores his central idea too much or not enough; either way, it’s an unsatisfying disappointment.

Neither a convincing conflict nor well-developed characters inhabit Besson’s script, about an American tourist of average intelligence who, while in Taiwan, is kidnapped by a crime lord and forced to become a drug mule. Scarlett Johansson’s titular heroine finds herself under the gun of Jang (Choi Min-sik, from the original Oldboy ), an imposing baddie who orders a pouch of an experimental drug called CPH4 sewn into her stomach, and into those of three other unwilling mules. After she’s transported into a shoddy cell, she receives a beating that unseals the pouch and sends the mystery drug coursing through her blood stream, electrifying her synapses in extraordinary shades of blue. As this goes on, Besson cross-cuts to a lecture by Samuel Norman (Morgan Freeman), an academic who speculates that things would get pretty out-there—telepathic control over matter, space, and time—should human beings ever gain control over 100 percent of their brain, which is exactly what happens to Lucy. The playful editing by Julien Rey also cross-cuts to nature scenes, such as a cheetah hunting a gazelle, to create a parallel between humans and animals, and demonstrate how far beyond basic primal human instincts Lucy will become.

The best scenes of Lucy occur early on, when there’s still some fragment of humanity left in Johansson’s performance, and her character is using 20 or 30 percent of her brain’s potential (Besson keeps track with a counter that flashes onscreen periodically). Lucy develops the ability to learn and perceive things we cannot imagine, and this transforms her into an unstoppable adversary for Jang’s band of thugs. These scenes where Lucy can out-fight and telekinetically outmaneuver gangsters remind us of Milla Jovovich running circles around alien goons in The Fifth Element . But before long, Lucy’s mental capacities increase and she quickly becomes aware that emotions are elementary functions and only hold us back from exploring our real potential. Here’s where the film begins to slow and we gradually lose any investment. It’s difficult to have sympathy for an already poorly drawn character who, now omnipotent, has no emotions and can do virtually anything she puts her mind to. It may have been more entertaining to preserve the early stage in Lucy’s development and wait until closer to the climax to unlock her full, emotionless potential.

The comparison to The Fifth Element is apt, as both films involve a supreme being who thwarts bad guys. What made The Fifth Element so engaging is that it wasn’t told from the supreme being’s perspective; rather, from that of her lovelorn protector (Bruce Willis). Besson introduces a similar role in Lucy with a Parisian cop Del Rio (Amr Waked), who serves as Lucy’s sidekick and whose scenes feel abridged. At one point, she kisses him as “a reminder” of her humanity; however, the moment feels like a forced attempt to emotionally invest the audience. At any rate, when Lucy begins reading minds and putting whole rooms of baddies to sleep with the wave of her hand, the cop becomes superfluous, and any attempt by Jang’s crew to stop her is devoid of tension when all it takes is a mere thought to defeat them. Meanwhile, Johansson’s character has more in common with her voiced OS in Her , who achieves transcendence through vast knowledge, while her emotionless performance echoes early scenes in Under the Skin , except without the inevitable dramatic payoff.

In the end, Besson’s script is involved in shoddy science propelled by the myth that we only use 10 percent of our brain. (Using EEGs, magnetoencephalographs, MRIs, and PET scans, neuroscientists have found no such dormant areas waiting to be uncovered. But who’s checking?) The myth was first proposed in a 1936 self-help book and has no basis in scientific fact, but still, the myth persists because, well, that’s what myths do. Nevertheless, Besson isn’t concerned with science and would rather enter the furthest reaches of exploratory metaphysics through imagery likened to The Matrix and The Tree of Life , where Lucy sees the world as endless streams of neurons and instantly taps into the vast reaches of space and time. It’s a fun idea, but Lucy never quite pays off in Besson’s usual popcorn-munching no-brainer terms, nor does he succeed in elevating the material to its highbrow possibilities. Indeed, Besson packs a lot of ideas into the brief 89-minute runtime, but he should’ve spent another 20 minutes on character development. And, to get as arbitrarily mathematical as his film, he’s only making use of about 65 percent of his concept’s potential.

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Deep in Her Gut, She Knows She’s Not Ordinary

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By Manohla Dargis

July 24, 2014

Thank goodness (or the goddess) for male directors who dig strong female characters. Whatever their reasons, these directors often expand the range of roles women play, whether it’s one of Howard Hawks’s dames calling the shots or one of James Cameron’s. That the French director Luc Besson, an industrious multi-hyphenate, has a thing for femmes fortes has been evident since 1990, when he unleashed a pouty toothpick in “ La Femme Nikita ,” a delirious, violent fantasy that turned an outlaw into a gun-toting gamine and an exploitable commodity that, in turn, spawned both an American big-screen remake (“ Point of No Return ”) and a television series.

Mr. Besson’s particular kink for fatal female beauties receives an entertaining workout in his latest film, “Lucy,” in which he again introduces a young woman who undergoes a remarkable metamorphosis that leads to convulsions of extreme violence and an increasingly frenzied visual style that lay waste to both men and any semblance of story sense. The nonsense begins when the title character — played by the improbable yet somehow perfect Scarlett Johansson — is pulled into a head-scratching plot in Taiwan, put into motion by a crime boss, Mr. Jang (the excellent South Korean actor Choi Min Sik ). He’s set to begin peddling an experimental recreational drug that she accidentally ingests, and in such enormous quantities that she’s soon transformed from a slacking expat into super-Scarlett.

Ms. Johansson’s rise as a major star is largely interesting because of its familiar reflexivity. Over a career that began in childhood — something that she shares with Elizabeth Taylor, along with sexual expressivity — she has taken on her share of unexceptional girls and women, but as her fame has increased, it’s become difficult for her to convey normality persuasively. Even when she has played more stock roles, she radiates extraordinariness, whether as a lust object in “Don Jon” or a dangerous agent in Marvel’s “Avengers” series. More unusual is her disembodied turn as a computer program in “ Her ” and her fleshed-out performance as a man-baiting, clothes-dropping E.T. in “Under the Skin,” both expressive of elusive, tantalizing, otherworldly stardom itself.

Given this, “Lucy” can’t help registering as the latest brush stroke in Ms. Johansson’s emerging portrait. The movie opens with her character — cheerfully frowzy, with swinging earrings, teetering heels and the telltale cheap cat-print adornment — arguing with a shady type, who turns out to be a new fling. They’re just two little people dwarfed by the surrounding towers of power, one of which is soon splattered with blood and carpeted with shattered glass and bullet casings. Mr. Besson isn’t a director who likes the slow boil: One minute, Lucy is a good-time gal unencumbered by a pesky back story (history and psychology aren’t essential elements in his auteurist arsenal); the next, she’s embroiled in an intrigue that goes from Asia to far-outsville.

Fueling this trip is the drug that, Lucy discovers after a blackout, has been surgically embedded in her tummy. Along with a handful of disposable types whose fates are sealed by their flop sweat and forgettable faces, she has been forcibly recruited as a drug mule. None of it makes much sense, but then Mr. Besson has never been one for narrative logic, being a bigger believer in the distractions of fast cuts, ping-ponging camera moves and spectacular bloodshed that sweep you up and away. He’s also good at casting, and Mr. Choi and Ms. Johansson are fun to watch as the action cranks up, and the drug leaks into Lucy’s system. It’s then that the movie goes from hyper to hyperkinetic: Suddenly she’s climbing the walls and scampering across the ceiling and into freedom, having tapped into newfound eerie powers. Yeah, the chase is on.

In between bullets and brawls, Mr. Besson throws out a lot to explain Lucy’s transformation, including reams of on-screen text and one Professor Norman (Morgan Freeman). Mr. Freeman may have taken a break from playing God, but his character is another gloss on his familiar role as the resident kindly father figure who, until the story goes haywire, shepherds the younger co-star and the audience both. Specifically, Norman has charted the brain power of humankind that explains what’s happening to Lucy. (Seriously, he uses charts to explain his ideas to an audience that’s a stand-in for us.) Lucy seeks him out, having realized that her rapidly escalating physical supremacy is part of a one-woman human potential movement that’s leading her into total awesomeness. She aches just like a woman (well, at first), but breaks like a god.

Buoyed by Ms. Johansson’s presence, Mr. Besson keeps his entertainment machine purring. He may be a hack, but he’s also a reliable entertainer, even when he’s recycling other directors’ ideas (a pinch of David Fincher here, a dash of Christopher Nolan there), or giddily engaging in slaughter and racist stereotypes. This is, after all, a movie that, stripped of its gimmick, comes down to a white woman being chased by hordes of Asian men. Mr. Besson’s thoughtlessness in this regard reaches an early nadir when Lucy shoots a Taiwanese man, nominally because he doesn’t speak English — a death that’s played for laughs. The scene’s vulgarity recalls Indiana Jones’s jokily shooting a sword-wielding Arab in “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” proving yet again that what looks new in Mr. Besson’s work is invariably old.

“Lucy” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Extreme gunplay and carnage.

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Movie Reviews

'lucy': hot buttered popcorn, with plenty of nuts.

Chris Klimek

Based on the theory that humans only use 10 percent of their brains, science-fiction film Lucy explores the possibilities when humans use full mental capacity through the title character played by Scarlett Johansson.

As Lucy is able to use more of her brain, and her abilities continue to evolve, she looks to professor Samuel Norman — an expert on the human brain played by Morgan Freeman — for some explanations. Jessica Forde/Universal Pictures hide caption

What would you do if you could access 100 percent of your brain's potential processing power? Reverse climate change? Pick up new languages while you sleep? Pay your rent on time? Invent an iPhone capable of making and receiving telephone calls?

More important: Would you savor the salty, crunchy, hot-buttered freshness of writer-director-mogul Luc Besson's wiggedy-wack but truly, madly deeply watchable thriller Lucy — a Ritalin-spiked pixy stick of a movie that pinches almost as much from Tree of Life as it does from The Matrix — even more? Or considerably less?

If it's the latter, then I pity you, Mr. or Ms. Fully Self-Actualized.

Look, this was already Scarlett Johansson's year: Just in the past eight months, she's given movie-elevating performances as the voice of Samantha, the self-aware operating system in Her (way to steal a film where we never even see you!); as the canny covert operative Black Widow in Captain America: The Winter Soldier (way not to get buried amid all that expensive pixel-smashing!); and, most spectacularly, as a mysterious being on a mysterious mission in Under the Skin, 2014's most purely cinematic film to date. Though made for a modest $13 million, it's recouped less than 20 percent of that in U.S. theatrical receipts. This is why we can't have nice movies, America. (In fact, we've had rather a lot of them this summer, no?)

Anyway, Lucy feels like the pre-chewed multiplex companion piece to that art house provocation, and a victory lap for its fascinating star. It isn't, how you say, smart , but — like last month's terrific Edge of Tomorrow — it's smarter than you expect. Which, adjusted for blockbuster inflation and high fructose corn syrup intake, feels like Very Smart Indeed, at least for the svelte 89 minutes of your life this film demands. At last, a would-be summer blockbuster that respects your time!

Arriving on the heels of the fifth Spider-Man and the seventh X-Men, Lucy channels the "Hey, Kids — SCIENCE!" spirit of early '60s Marvel Comics more truly than either of them. In those scripts that Stan "The Man" Lee used to grind out at a rate of six or seven per month, exposure to radiation invariably conferred superpowers instead of cancer. Well. Lucy does for recreational drugs what The Fantastic Four did for Gamma Rays. If the overdose is massive enough and the dope powerful enough, it unlocks doors previously accessible only to those who've read The Secret . Or Flowers for Algernon.

For the first 10 minutes, our Lucy (ScarJo) is just a party-loving American expat in Taipei who has fallen in with a really wrong crowd. A family of mobsters commanded by Choi Min-sik — the South Korean star of Park Chan-wook's admirably sick-minded international hit Oldboy — sews a bag of superdope inside her gut against her will, which is as every bit as gross and terrifying as it sounds. When the bag ruptures, instead of expiring in a blast of endorphin-soaked euphoria, our Lucy finds herself crabwalkin' on the ceiling like Linda Blair. Or Lionel Ritchie. Or Spider-Pig, depending on what decade this is.

But these are mere growing pains on the bumpy road to post-biological omnipotence (so long, deodorant! Smell ya later, dental floss!), a road that — as Brilliant Neuroscientist or Something Dr. Morgan Freeman, Ph.D. (Morgan Freeman) explains in a lecture at L'Académie du Cinéma la Fausee Science et Exposition that's intercut with the drug-smuggling story — we too could travel If We Only Had The Full Use of Our Pre-Installed Brain, as the song goes.

It's actually a different Suspiciously Well-Informed Movie Doctor who has the duty of explaining to ScarJo that the stuff in her system is in fact a synthetic version of a chemical expectant mothers produce naturally to nourish the babies in their wombs. As that baby formula swims through her all-grown-up bloodstream, ScarJo begins another cycle of rapid evolution, developing the ability to manipulate her body at the cellular level, to see and manipulate radio waves, and eventually, to surf the space-time continuum from an office chair.

Which is not where I was expecting this movie to go.

Sorry, what's that? Yes, of course she's gonna take care of the rapey, tatted-up creeps who tried to make her their drug mule. Lucy goes from tearful sheep to cold-eyed wolf in one scene, but why make us wait? After efficiently sating our bloodlust for those degenerates, the movie gets on to other, more interesting business. Namely, Lucy has to get herself to Dr. Freeman so her unprecedented advance in human evolution can be observed and documented and written about in goop magazine. She also needs to acquire the rest of the stash — there were other mules, you see — "for medicinal purposes," as she deadpans. (This is a movie that confidently understands what its druggies want: More drugs! ALL OF THE DRUGS!)

Besson — best known for the odd and visually rich action pictures La Femme Nikita, Léon : The Professional , and The Fifth Element — churns out films at a tireless pace, but it's been a long while since a picture he directed made much of a splash in Cinémas américains. Last year, his witness protection comedy The Family did a fast fade, despite the presence of Robert De Niro, Tommy Lee Jones and the too-seldom-seen Michelle Pfeiffer. We tend to prefer the Transporter and Taken franchises, wherein Besson, credited as a writer and producer, seems to scribble a few notes on a bar napkin and leave the stunt coordinators to work out the rest. (Which is not to deny Liam Neeson's A Very Particular Set of Skills telephone monologue from Taken its rightful place as the St. Crispin's Day speech of the 21st century.)

Lucy is a welcome reminder of just how much Besson's wry sensibility as a filmmaker adds to movies like this. It opens with a shamelessly prurient extreme close-up of cell division while Eric Serra's vaguely porn-y slow-jam score bumps and grinds along. When Lucy is in danger, Besson (who also edited the picture) cuts to shots of a big cat stalking a gazelle. Later, we get flashes of animals (and humans) mating and giving birth, a real-time, channel-surfing commentary on the story we're watching. It seems impossible that no filmmaker has thought to do this already, but I can't think of one offhand. Good job, Monsieur Besson.

Like so many other movies this summer, this is an international affair, traveling from Taipei to Berlin to Paris. Egyptian actor Amr Waked even gets a second-banana role as a bewildered Parisian police captain.

But Besson finds a way to make his obligatory superhero origin scenes feel fresh. In the funniest doctor visit in a movie since the xenomorph abortion in Prometheus , Lucy corrals a surgeon at gunpoint and orders him to remove the leaking bag of superdope. While he's doing that, she phones home. One of the drug's early effects is total recall of everything she's ever experienced. "I can remember the taste of your milk," she tells her bewildered mom. At least one person in the theater groaned in revulsion, but I thought it was touching.

The climax, set in Paris, crosscuts Lucy's meetup with a roomful of the World's Most Brilliant Scientists with a gunbattle between the French police and the Taiwanese gangsters in the corridors outside. (Smuggling drugs through customs requires surgical rape, but flying from Taipei to Paris with enough fully automatic weapons to storm the Bastille all over again ain't no thing, apparently.) Besson cuts the shootout in a way that conveys his diminished interest in it: One insert shows a statue, probably hundreds of years old, losing its nose to a stray round. Always these morons and their guns, its expression seems to say.

Meanwhile at the grown-up table, ScarJo holds court with the eggheads. "Now that I have access to the furthest reaches of my brain, I see things clearly," she begins.

It doesn't even sound clunky when she says it. Now that , ladies and gentlemen, is a movie star.

Lucy (2014) Ending Explained: Will Lucy Survive An Unexplainable Human Experience?

Lucy 2014 Ending, Explained: Lucy is an American action thriller with many undertones of spirituality laced into action sequences, the characterization of a super-human female who unlocks every cell in her brain. The film is a close look into the brain’s functionality that works on a level unknown to humankind. It is fiction supplying enough thrill for us to understand and align with the science of possibilities for the future of humankind.

Director Luc Besson moves us with a film that boggles our brains (pun intended considering what the film talks about) with facts that make us think about the possibilities of the brain functioning at such high levels; the consequences of the same seem almost ridiculous. Contrarily, the way medicine and the world are going, and it does not sound entirely impossible.

Lucy (2014) Movie Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis:

This incredulous and exciting piece of film that delves into the creative world of neuropathy and brain function makes for an engaging watch as the protagonist Lucy (Scarlett Johansson), a simple student studying in Taipei, is suddenly put into a dangerous situation. This situation changes her as an individual and makes her question everything about her new reality only because of a synthetic drug produced from a specific hormone of a pregnant woman, severely altering her whole being.

What Does Lucy Do To Understand The Drug CPH4?

The brain controls our thoughts, memories, and speech along with the movement of the arms and legs, with the function of many organs within our body. With the many aspects of the brain ruling certain parts and functions of our body, the human brain functions at about 10 percent of its normal capacity. Further note, the central nervous system (CNS) is composed of the brain and spinal cord.

While these functions are allocated to either the left or the right side of the brain, every experience we go through in life is experienced through these functions and lodged within our brain as memory . The film displays a distinct possibility that there is a high likelihood of a drug that could be produced to help us experience memories from very far back in our past, in detail of our present and the future as and when we wish to experience it. Only it has one caveat. Your body cannot exist at the same time. Or rather, you become a particulate cell of the galaxy transcending through both space and time, backward and forwards.

The story is meaningless in the film when it tries to follow and break down the science behind neuropathy and brain function. When trying to explain what Lucy wants to achieve, it just becomes a task. The truth is she does not know herself. She is a cell only learning about herself and becoming more acquainted with the world devoid of emotion that remotely leans towards power, the greed for money, and, the most dangerous of all, the realization of the want to conquer. With purposeful intent, Besson brings us a character devoid of these emotions.

The film begins with Lucy, a student in Taipei, who is thrown into a dangerous situation when her boyfriend forces her to make a delivery that changes her life. When she makes the delivery, she is taken into the room, and Mr. Jang, who does not trust her boyfriend, gives her the code to open it. After the contents of the case are realized to be synthetic blue pills known as CPH4, a drug made from the hormone secreted from a pregnant woman in her 6th week of pregnancy, Jhang’s principal doctor decides to recruit Lucy as a drug mule along with a few others and send them across to different parts of the world.

When Lucy is taken after the bag of drugs has been inserted underneath her tummy, she is put into a room to be kicked viciously. The bag underneath her stomach breaks, and the drug begins to synthesize with her system entering her bloodstream. She experiences the drug for the first time. After doing so, her brain snaps to complete attention. She is a new person in a physical body who only perceives physical reality; however, because of her higher-functioning neuropathic transmitters, she is only experiencing 20% of her brain activity. She observes a tree’s stem cells moving through its veins as it begins to glow like a Christmas tree. It makes her move faster than usual. Since the brain makes all the decisions, the heart only steps in when it takes a break to absorb the present moment.

While trying to understand the world of computers, her calculative ability, and her heightened sense of brain function (now growing slowly in its capacity), she can connect to the technological world as if she is one with the parts of a computer. Once she frees herself from the room, she knows how to work a gun and survive. A certain instinct tells her she needs to know more about the drug, so she returns to Chang’s office.

When Lucy’s brain is slowly peaking at 28 percent, she connects to all sorts of technology almost seamlessly. When she visits a doctor and forces him to repair her shoulder and have the pills removed from her tummy, he explains to her that her brain is not operating at a normal rate and hence will wear her body out to meet a speedy death. She understands that time is running out, and within 24 hours, she can meet her death. It forces her to track the other shipments of the drugs. She returns to Chang’s office and absorbs his previous memories to recollect the locations of the other drug mules.

After going through all the research on CPH4 and a high-functioning brain, she appears on Professor Norman’s ( Morgan Freeman ) phone and his television screen to tell him she is willing to cooperate with him regarding being part of a study of the human brain. After understanding that her body is about to wither at an incredibly fast rate, Lucy must work quickly to consume the rest of the drugs to live through the day.

Lucy (2014) Movie Ending, Explained: How does Lucy help Professor Norman?

Being able to transform is one of her newly discovered abilities, and she wastes no time. As every cell in her body is activated, it almost acts as an individual free cell moving out of her body and changing its identity at will. It helps her transform into a new entity and become a new person at any time. Through Jang’s memory, she disguised herself to the point where all the drug mules were currently located. Jang’s Korean entourage is heavy at work to try and frantically track the drug mules from Captain Pierre Del Rio’s grasp.

Lucy beat him to it by notifying Captain Del Rio about where the drug mules are, and he immediately puts his task force into motion to find these men. His subordinates screen them at Immigration at different airports. While she is on the plane to meet with the Police Officer, things get out of hand when her body starts to split, and her skin starts to disintegrate. Her body is fighting with her to disintegrate and become one, with the universe turning her invisible, but she needs to stay together physically.

With her brain function at 40 percent, she has run out of all the previous stock of CPH4 and needs more to stay alive until she is ready to embrace an inevitable death. She uses the last bit of the stock to open her eyes, finding herself in the hospital. When she wakes up and sees Del Rio, she immediately gets up and starts moving toward where the drug mules are. Under the custody of the Police, the Koreans manage to track the drug mules, and a battle ensues where the drug mules are killed. The Koreans manage to remove the pouches full of pills, but Lucy gets there in time to acquire it without letting them touch or harm her.

At 70 percentile brain function, she has consumed all the remaining drugs and moves towards Professor Norman’s laboratory at the University of Paris. Jang has also followed her with his men. She sits down with the Professor and his colleagues to take one last large dose of CPH4. Her body suddenly bursts through time and dimensions. She moves slowly and vividly into the past through the stone age and meets Lucy, the last living ancestor of Human Kind. In the corridor outside, Del Rio is defending the room, and Jang is firing heavily at him to gain access to Lucy.

While her brain function is reaching a full 100 percent, a missile is launched, hitting the room and thrusting Lucy into another dimension. She meets the dinosaurs. Taking in all the information, her body connects to the computers and servers in the lab. She produces a dark substance (almost like Venom) to learn everything about the world today. It makes her produce a new generation of computers, combining human and computer intelligence. Her body produces a new standing figure in black, acting as a live system, connecting every particulate matter in the universe. In the end, she makes a pen drive of all that she has learned and outstretches it towards Professor Norman. No one can see her in a physical form because she has embraced death as a transient being, existing between both life and death, therefore not completely dead.

Final Words on Lucy

While in an interview with a journalist, Besson talks about how this idea came about. While he was sitting with a neuroscientist, he had a very engaging conversation with her about what she does while assuming she wanted to be an actress. His fascination with the subject led him to dig deep for nine years, and after many more conversations later with different neuroscientists, Besson learned that he could make this work.

While it may have been unusual to cast a woman in such a role, it was done to understand that a man might not have contributed to the audience’s greater interest in the narrative. While making her devoid of emotions that leaned towards sin, he embraced a different avatar for her. Somewhere, one would notice a sense of The Messiah complex that feeds into the possibility of a spiritual undercurrent. While this may have a particular tonality, the purpose of the story not making sense or sounding relatively weak was created with the clear intent of aligning more with science. The film is a thrilling watch that engages the viewer with fantastical trivia and whispers of a distinct possibility for a sequel.

Lucy (2014) Movie External Links: IMDb Cast: Scarlett Johansson , Morgan Freeman , Choi Min-sik , Amr Waked

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Luc Besson's Surprisingly Metaphysical "Lucy"

By Richard Brody

The early trailer for Luc Besson’s new film, “Lucy,” promised giddy digital wizardry , and the movie delivers, in a way that surprised me. I saw that it would have a pulp-fiction setup (though I couldn’t foresee the gore). I knew that it would involve Scarlett Johansson displaying supernatural powers. I had no idea that it would borrow metaphysical themes, imagery, and even ideas from the films of Terrence Malick. Besson, who wrote the script and directed, makes use of a keen science-fiction setup that could be lifted from a scrappy and hectic nineteen-fifties drive-in classic. He reaches speculative heights that are fascinating to ponder, thrilling to watch onscreen, and silly to throw away on a rickety story with clumsily pumped-up excitement and emptied-out implications.

Johansson—happily and sassily back on Earth and out of her eerie-astral mode—plays the title role. She’s an American student in Taipei whose boyfriend ropes her into a scheme that lands her in the hands of crime lords. They turn her into an involuntary mule, with pouches of an exotic new drug sewn into her stomach. When the pouches rupture, the instant overdose doesn’t kill her; it sends her into a particular sort of overdrive.

That’s where the ingeniously faux science comes in. Morgan Freeman plays Dr. Samuel Norman, a neuroscientist with an audacious theory based on the commonplace fictional fact that human beings use only a small percentage of their brains. The professor speculates—based on the keen perceptual abilities of dolphins—that, were we able to tap into a higher percentage, the results wouldn’t merely be an increase in intellectual power but new forms of perception and agency that would seem, by our current standards, extrasensory.

The theory is put to the test when Lucy gets hyperdrugged. The substance increases her percentage of cerebral access, and she becomes what students dream of being: a memorious speed-reader, an instant language-learner, and a super-accelerated stereo-typist (with both hands blazing separately on the keyboards of two laptops). Then things get weird: Professor Norman’s theories turn out to be right, and Lucy is able to perceive such things, she says (and I quote Lucy loosely), as the stuff of her own metabolism, the blood in her veins, every memory (including those dredged up from infancy), the force of gravity, the spinning of the globe.

I confess: this notion, which Besson conjures solely through the power of the word, is a scenaristic stroke of cinema. It suffices for Lucy to claim such knowledge—and then, to speak by phone to her mother about some primal experiences from infancy—for it to seem real. It’s at such moments (and there aren’t many) that a vestige of Besson’s own primordial and perhaps unconscious cinematic heritage, the modern French cinema of talk, comes to the fore.

Besson also contrives clever visual correlates for Lucy’s heightened perceptions, showing, from her point of view, something like colorful strings of energy arising from people in the street, which, taken together, become curtains of energy that—though lining the city—she can summon to arm’s length and manipulate manually like a touch screen, prying apart with two fingers a string from which she can access streams of linguistic and symbolic data.

By then, Lucy’s amped-up physical and quasi-metaphysical powers have also kicked in. She finds that she can exert electromagnetic power from afar, and then, eventually, do even more. Lucy is also interested in chasing down the criminals who put her into this predicament, and she heads to Paris both to consult the professor and join forces with a French police officer to prevent a drug-mob massacre. To do this, of course, she harnesses these new powers. (Some neat effects involve action at a close distance—pinning assailants to the ceiling, emptying the cartridge of an attacker’s gun before he can shoot her, creating force fields that her pursuers slam up against.)

But Besson saves the best for the extremes of micro- and macro-experience. He looks to the molecular with visions of globules dividing and hysterical-impressionistic, multicolored riots of vascular and neural overexcitement. The grand-scale part comes when Lucy’s control of ambient energy taps into the mainframe of existence, the core of space and time. The trailer shows some wondrous stop-motion effects in Times Square and Lucy’s power to swipe action in and out, from high-speed to frozen and back, with her hand, as if swiping along a smartphone or tablet screen. Besson takes this idea audaciously, exhilaratingly far. I won’t spoil the contemplative delight, except to say that he comes amazingly close to territory covered in the more visionary moments of Malick’s “The Tree of Life.” Even now, I can hardly believe what I saw in “Lucy.”

Yet Malick’s movie—with its authentically profound considerations of the links between experience and transcendence, between ordinary life and intuitions of the absolute, between scientific knowledge and religious ecstasy—has an aesthetic, a style, a tone, a mood, which cohere with its grand ideas. His scenes of family drama in Texas, featuring such actors as Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain, are filmed as distinctively and with as original and imaginative a vision as his synthetic images of the beyond, and the substance of that drama (down to the role of music in it, which meshes with the music heard on the soundtrack) is integral to his cinematic-philosophical creation.

Besson, by contrast, films the action with energy and flair but little originality. He realizes his characters with virtually no tendrils of identity to link up to his grander conceit. The emptily throbbing music, by Eric Serra, is placed on the soundtrack no differently from the way that similarly generic action music is employed in “Transformers,” “Edge of Tomorrow,” or other, lesser violent thrillers.

And, no, it isn’t the violence that’s a problem. It often seems that the cinema divides, like culture at large, into two worlds—one based on visions of peace and harmony, the other based on energy and violence—the cinema of “Boyhood” and the cinema of “Transformers,” for instance. (Of course, Malick himself, whose movies of exalted aesthetic confection are also rooted in a tragic vision of violence, proves that the dichotomy is artistically bankrupt.) It would be easy to deride Besson for seeming to co-opt the intellectual basis of Malick’s transcendent cinematic world in order to trick up a banal and conventional crime story with conventional sympathies and conventional cinematic pleasures of bloody mayhem.

But even that idea, in principle, could be a good one. Why not, according to the strange and subterranean circuits of history, conjure vast metaphysical consequences from the sort of seamy story that might make for a few lines in a newspaper’s crime blotter? That’s an idea as true to history as it is rooted in cinematic and artistic history. But Besson’s film doesn’t display the documentary sensibility, the practical curiosity, that this would entail. There’s no problem with the movie’s pulp-fiction essence; the problem is that almost all of Besson’s formidable imagination went into the science-fiction concept and the magnificent computer-graphic realization of it, and very little of that brain power went into the ordinary framework. It’s only through the exercise of observation and the application of invention that the ordinary becomes, in itself, extraordinary. Here, Besson merely adorns the implacable ordinary with elements of the extraordinary. It’s the difference between a movie that offers casual delight (as “Lucy” does) and one that goes into the wonder.

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Lucy (2014) : Movie Plot Ending Explained

This film is about the concept of how humans don’t utilize more than 10% of their brains. No we’re not talking about those idiots who drive while talking on their phone or chatter through entire films. Even the more intelligent, evolved humans are unable to tap into more than 10% – 15% of their brain power. Many scientists have shunned this theory. There are a group of people who are aligned to this theory in the real world today. Morgan Freeman, the voice of God, plays a scientist in this movie (Prof Norman) who advocates the theory of 10%. Here’s the plot and ending of Lucy explained; spoilers ahead.

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Where To Watch?

To find where to stream any movie or series based on your country, use This Is Barry’s Where To Watch .

Oh, and if this article doesn’t answer all of your questions, drop me a comment or an FB chat message, and I’ll get you the answer . You can find other film explanations using the search option on top of the site.

Lucy Plot Explained

Scarlett Johansson plays Lucy, a student living in Taipei. Her boyfriend tricks her into working for his Korean mob boss. Her job is to transport a new type of drug CPH4 which has been placed into her stomach through surgery. This is a make-belief drug which is planned to be sold in Europe. Lucy gets attacked by one of the mob men and this causes the packet in her stomach to rip.

I’m going to keep away from stepping into the details of each of the scenes and focus on what’s happening with Lucy. The drug affects Lucy in a way that enables her to tap into more than 10% of her brain capacity. We’re given a clear visual through the film as to where her percentage utilization has reached.

Why would increased brain usage result in better combat skills?

The first set of consequences of the drug results in Lucy becoming physically more enhanced. Well, perhaps this can be attributed to adrenaline. Adrenaline is a hormone secreted in our bodies by glands. The hormone increases the fight or flight response. When in state of panic, the hormone is secreted and causes a higher state of alertness and reduces reaction time. Of course, this is short lived for normal people. For Lucy this would be in much higher proportions and results in much higher state of physical speed and reflexes. She’s also losing her ability to feel pain and other emotions in general. That helps in a fight.

How does increased brain activity lead to telepathy?

She kills her captors and telepathically gains information of the other drug mules with CPH4 inside them. Let’s look a little into telepathy. It is the fictional ability a person has to read another person’s mind. The brain works based on a series of electric signals being passed around in the neural network. If the sense of touch can be increased many folds, it could theoretically feel the electric activity in another person’s brain. I know it’s far fetched, stay with me here. With an enhanced brain, Lucy can now decode another person’s brain functions. She taps into his memory to gain access to the destinations of all the mules. That’s all I’ve got. Please do comment if you have a better theory.

Lucy uses her home computer and reaches out to Prof. Norman. She hacks into Prof. Norman’s hotel room TV. We can assume that it is a smart TV which has Internet access, therefore an IP and a vulnerable port that can be hacked. Lucy has a higher understanding of the human body now and figures that her roommate can possibly suffer from a critical ailment and warns her to change her lifestyle.

What happens to Lucy on the flight? What is she doing with two laptops?

Lucy begins tracking down each of the mules. She locates officer Pierre to aid her with the situation. Lucy is collating all her learnings into document format and is using two laptops to increase her typing speed. Why can’t she simply alter the electric pulses in the computer to create documents? Perhaps she can’t do that just yet. What she can do is sense the air hostess’ medical condition to preempt the nose bleed. She doesn’t need touch to do this anymore. Just like we can sense when something is hot based on the ambience and don’t have to actually burn our hand to figure it’s hot.

Lucy sips on champagne and apparently that does not go well with CPH4. Note to self – do not mix alcohol and CPH4. This causes Lucy’s cell structure to want to disintegrate. What we see happening to her is parts of her just disintegrating. Does the champagne do this, may be, or her body is reaching a stage where each cell has the ability to self sustain and doesn’t need to be connected to the rest of the cells. Lucy controls her body by eating more CPH4. Withdrawal symptoms in short, maybe.

How does increased brain activity lead to telekinesis?

Lucy pairs with Pierre while he watches her take out a set of goons with her mind. She throws in an invisible forcefield and sets the gang afloat. What we see here is telekinesis. Telekinesis is a fictional ability to move objects using just the brain. Well, all matter is made up of atoms. If one has the heightened ability to interact with the matter in air to form a chain reaction to finally affect the destination matter (in this case the goons), you can have people up and floating in no time. The forcefield works the same way. Get the molecules of air to contract and work like a solid object, you can make an invisible wall.

Lucy collects all the CPH4 and heads with Pierre to meet Prof Norman. Norman explains the purpose of life is to pass on knowledge, this happens at the level of DNA. Lucy asks for the remainder of CPH4 to be pumped into her. This is where the shit gets crazy.

Lucy Ending Explained: What on earth is happening to Lucy in the end?

Once all the CPH4 goes in, her brain nears 90% utilization. As Lucy’s brain function elevates further and further, she is able to tap into and use all forms of energy around her. She can look into the past or the stars and galaxy because they are all forms of light energy that she can access. (eg: The reflection of yourself in a mirror is you looking at the past – because light takes finite time to travel from you to the mirror and back to your eyes)

Apparently, at this point her brain can restructure all of the cells of the body to transform into some weird computer of sorts. After all, the computer has been designed based on the human brain. Lucy is hard at work collating all her understanding into a readable medium. A medium that can be plugged into a USB port. Well, given that’s the only interface that we use, her device adheres to our current capability.

The final disintegration bit was a little outrageous. The theory there is that with 100% tapping of a brain’s functions, you don’t need to exist in the physical form of a human at all. She becomes an omnipresent consciousness that is connected through pure energy. Pure energy that can alter other form of energy as she likes. She is able to control electromagnetic fields to get networks to send out SMSs. SMSs are after all signals that are sent to the phone over a wireless network.

I’m not sure if research was done into the Indian philosophies around dvaitam , advaitam and vishishtadvaitam for this film. The resemblance is uncanny.

Dvaitam : Is the concept that most of the world follows. There is a divine power and there are the creations of the divine power. This is dualism. God and Man.

Advaitam : Is the concept of one single reality. Atman (the living soul) is the same as Bhraman (single reality). What life is, is merely an illusion that we perceive. Everything living is merely a combined conscience. To get to that realization is deemed attaining Nirvana. God, Man is all one, just need to perceive it.

Vishishtadvaitam : is the concept of one single reality too. The difference is that here we have the divine power has multiplicity. This means the living exist in a pseudo-singular existence, but death causes the being to unite with the single reality. God, Man is all one and united post life.

Lucy explains that “we never really die”. This pairs well with the concept of Vishishtadvaitam where death only leads to rejoining a singular reality. Lucy, based on the concepts of Advaitam, has attained Nirvana and is now aware that she’s part of that singular reality and doesn’t need her physical body anymore. “She is everywhere”. Some of the concepts posed by the film borderline with insanity, but hope helps clear some cloud.

Barry is a technologist who helps start-ups build successful products. His love for movies and production has led him to write his well-received film explanation and analysis articles to help everyone appreciate the films better. He’s regularly available for a chat conversation on his website and consults on storyboarding from time to time. Click to browse all his film articles

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Lucy: A Film Review

Related Papers

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Kevser Ateş

eduardo schenberg

TransMissions: The Journal of Film and Media Studies

nili R Broyer

Implementing a disability studies and cultural studies framework, this paper offers a critical analysis of the two popular science fiction films: Lucy (Besson, 2014) and Her (Jonze, 2013). In both films, Scarlett Johansson plays the leading female character. In Lucy, the protagonist is a human being who experiences radical transformation due to an overdose of a new kind of drug, while in Her, Samantha is an operating system designed to evolve. Despite their clear differences, Lucy and Samantha share a similar destiny. Eventually, both of these figures develop into a super-able consciousness that continues to evolve beyond the restrictions of the physical world. I argue that the two films reflect what Gregor Wolbring termed as “the transhumanized version of ableism”. Transhumanism is a contemporary social movement that calls for a future in which biological boundaries are overcome. From a transhumanist perspective, all human bodies—impaired or able-bodied alike—are inferior, deficient and ultimately disabled. As such, they all need to be ‘cured.’ Thus, the transhumanist solution becomes not the enhancement of the body, but rather the creation of an independent enhanced mind. Lucy’s and Her’s representations of an advanced mind with no body are aligned with this futuristic aspiration. Both offer the viewers a first glance at a potential future in which technology enables consciousness to prosper without a body. At the end of both films, the body is envisioned as an unnecessary barrier—as an obstacle to reaching a more advanced state of being. This dismissive portrayal of the body is achieved by the well-known trope of cure. Following the enhancement of her mind, Lucy’s body begins to deform and disintegrate to the point that she almost dies. By absorbing more doses of the drug, her mind succeeds in overcoming her body and eventually Lucy is ‘cured’ from its restrictions. On the other hand, Samantha cannot be considered a real human being. This ‘disabling’ state is resolved by her ongoing growth and change of attitude. Finally, Samantha is ‘cured’ and proved superior to flesh and blood human beings. These ‘ultra-cure’ narratives are recognized by me to be part of a fundamental long-lasting ableist western ideology and an integral part of the Eugenic doctrine.

Shalonda Reese

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Journal of Textile Design Research and Practice

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An interview in 2015 with artist Lucy Brown in her Brighton studio gave rise in due course to this reflective essay. In it I consider the particular moment of meeting, capturing that in text, before Brown was required to move to a different studio space and adopt a different way of thinking and working. Essentially, this text is about that moment, and my cerebral and visceral response to an artist in her seemingly natural environment articulating her concerns and obsessions, rather than a holistic and overarching analysis of Brown’s oeuvre. Keywords: Spider, woven, embodied, female, vintage, intimate

Journal of Human Evolution

Milford Wolpoff

by Jamaica Kincaid

Lucy Summary

Jamaica Kincaid 's Lucy chronicles the life of the protagonist, Lucy, over her first year in America as an au pair . The author herself came to America as an au pair . Kincaid originally published the novel as installments in the New Yorker ; the novel is arranged into five episodic chapters. Lucy narrates her story by interspersing flashbacks, dreams, and internal dialogue. The product is a nonlinear narrative that flows smoothly between past and present because of the strength of Lucy's voice and Kincaid's craft.

Upon arriving in America, Lucy finds everything new, from the weather to the refrigerator. Lucy feels an influx of unexpected emotions. When she left home, she expected to feel excitement and relief rather than homesickness. In order to comfort herself, Lucy dreams of her grandmother's cooking.

Lucy likes the family she works for. Lewis , the father, is a successful lawyer, and his wife Mariah is a willing guide and source of support for Lucy throughout her adjustment. Mariah and Lewis yearn to expose Lucy not only to new things but also to new concepts. For example, after Lucy tells the family about a dream full of sexual imagery in which she was naked and running away from Lewis, they realize that she would better grasp the dream's implications if she had encountered Freud. Throughout her time with the family, Lewis and Mariah buy Lucy not only a book on Freud but also a myriad of other books on various topics such as photography and feminism.

March comes around, and Mariah is looking forward to spring. Daffodils are one of Mariah's favorite flowers, but Lucy despises them even though she has never seen them. As a child Lucy was made to memorize a poem about them. Although she recited the poem perfectly, she deeply resented it. Back in the present, Mariah is busy making plans for the family's summer trip to the lake house, and Lucy meets her new best friend Peggy . Peggy helps her get acclimated to American culture, but she is a bad example and is not allowed around the children.

The family travels to their summer home by the Great Lakes. Lucy has never been on a train before, but she perceptively observes that all of the people who look like her relatives are performing work as servants. Lucy and the four girls accustom themselves to the daily routine at the lake house, where they walk through the forest to the beach. At the lake house, Lucy meets Dinah 's brother Hugh . Lucy and Hugh instantly find a connection and become lovers. At the end of the summer, however, they part ways.

Upon the family's return to New York in September, Lucy begins to make some major changes. She drops her nursing classes and studies photography instead. One night at a party with Peggy, Lucy meets a fascinating artist named Paul . As Lucy as Paul become lovers, Peggy and Lucy grow apart. Despite being determined to be fully independent, Peggy and Lucy make arrangements to share an apartment.

Meanwhile, the household of Mariah and Lewis has taken a turn for the worse. They argue more frequently. Eventually Mariah asks Lewis to leave after his affair with Dinah has been revealed.

A pivotal moment occurs when Lucy's relative Maude Quick arrives at the house unexpectedly. She bears the news of Lucy's father's death. It has been over a month, but Lucy is unaware of it, never having opened any of her mother's letters. Lucy immediately sends all of her savings home, and Mariah contributes money too. Yet this sorrow has not overcome Lucy's hostility to her origins. She remains angry with her mother. Along with the money, she sends a bitter letter blaming her mother for marrying the kind of man who would leave her in debt.

Lucy goes through a period of depression. That January, she quits her job with Mariah and moves into the apartment with Peggy. As a secretary for a photographer, Lucy is truly living on her own, truly not caring for anyone. The novel closes with Lucy writing her full name on a blank journal, yet wishing that she could love someone deeply.

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Lucy Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Lucy is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Why Lucy had a sudden sinking feeling?

Chapter please?

immidiately upon coming to america lucy is faced with disillusionment examine several disillusionment and how they contribute in forming of her evolving identity

Colonialism repeatedly surfaces in Lucy's flashbacks of her homeland, a British colony. As a product of the British educational system, Lucy begins to realize the extent of its influence more powerfully once she has left her home culture. Lucy...

What are comparison drwan between lucy and nature?

In the poem Lucy, Wordsworth doesn't seem able to decide whether Lucy os more like a star in the night sky.... ot a delicate violet. She is, of course, his star.... and yet, he sees more of the violet in her. A delicate bloom aligned with nature.

Study Guide for Lucy

Lucy study guide contains a biography of Jamaica Kincaid, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

Character List

Essays for Lucy

Lucy essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid.

The Double Lives of Servants: A Comparison and Contrast Between the Representation of Servants in Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts and Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy
Maternal Problematic: The Painful Struggle for Individuality in Three Novels
I Am Who (You Say) I Am: Issues of Identity in Kincaid's Lucy and Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea
Mariah in Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy
Freedom Does Not Equal Happiness: Analyzing Lucy's Choices

Lesson Plan for Lucy

About the Author
Study Objectives
Common Core Standards
Introduction to Lucy
Relationship to Other Books
Bringing in Technology
Notes to the Teacher
Related Links
Lucy Bibliography

Wikipedia Entries for Lucy

Introduction
Plot summary
Main characters
Motifs and themes
The role of Lucy’s past

Lucy : The Dumbest Movie Ever Made About Brain Capacity

An extended spoilereview of Luc Besson’s worst film to date

As the brain capacity of Scarlett Johansson's character, Lucy, rises, all semblance of logic plummets.

Every now and then a movie comes along that’s so beyond-the-pale sloppy, so disastrous in both conceit and execution, that it simply defies conventional analysis. It happened with The Happening . There was something unspeakably wrong with The Words . And Broken City was utterly beyond repair.

So, too, with Lucy , the writer/director/producer Luc Besson’s mind-bendingly miscalculated sci-fi vehicle for Scarlett Johansson. In its defense, I can offer only that Johansson is a moderately charismatic presence (despite playing a character who barely qualifies as a character) and that the film clocks in at a mercifully brief 89 minutes. That said, the sheer quantity of inanity that Besson squeezes into his limited screen time beggars that of awful movies of substantially greater length.

Consequently, what follows is not a review but a spoilereview. If you are genuinely considering watching Lucy —and I urgently recommend that you reconsider—you should stop reading now. If, by contrast, you plan to give the movie a pass and would like to have your good judgment ratified (or, alternatively, if you have stumbled out of the theater bewildered and seeking commiseration), read on. Because while Besson has made very, very bad films in the past—most recently, last year’s The Family —this is the first time he has made a film so idiotic that the only way to properly convey its flaws is to enumerate them.

1. The movie’s first image is of a single cell, shimmying in the light; then, in huge letters Scarlett Johansson ; then, the cell dividing via mitosis into two identical duplicates, and then four. This is what is referred to in Hollywood as “wishful thinking.”

2. We watch as an early hominid, Australopithecus, drinks water from a stream a few million years ago. In voiceover, Johansson asks us, “Life was given to us a billion years ago. What have we done with it?” Flash forward to a montage of modern metropolises buzzing away, full of cars and buses and skyscrapers and clothed people engaging in spoken language. Was Johansson’s question rhetorical? Because it actually seems as though we’ve accomplished quite a lot since we were naked and furry, drinking water from streams.

3. Ah, but now we’re in Taipei, and we get the point. A moderately unkempt Johansson—her character’s name is Lucy, and she is a student, though the latter fact is entirely irrelevant—is talking to a chump in a beard and foolish sunglasses outside a fancy office building. This is what she meant about our having wasted a billion years of life on Earth: However much we may have evolved otherwise, some of us—even some who look like Scarlett Johansson—still date jerks as self-evident as this one. This regrettable beau (they’ve been together a week) confirms the lesson by telling Lucy, against all available evidence, that he’s recently visited a museum. There, he made the discovery that “The first woman was named Lucy.” Yes, that was the Australopithecus we saw by the stream. Yes, this is the kind of movie we are in for.

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4. Now it’s time for some plot, though I’m being generous with the term: Lucy’s semi-boyfriend is acting as a courier, transporting a small silver briefcase to someone in the office building. But he’s had trouble with building security in the past, so he asks her to take it in for him—he assures her it’s “only paperwork”—and to deliver it to a “Mr. Jang.” When she declines, he handcuffs her to the case, claiming that only Jang has the combination. So Lucy reluctantly goes into the building, asks for Jang, and is whisked upstairs by goons. The boyfriend is immediately executed, which can only be regarded as a relief all around.

5. Intercut with the previous scene is footage of a cheetah stalking, and ultimately downing, an antelope on the Serengeti. (Besson was evidently among the very few fans of Ridley Scott’s The Counselor .) It’s a metaphor, you see, for the bad guys who are closing in on helpless Lucy. In a little while, we’ll be treated a few more nature reels, though these will be used in a more literal fashion. After that, the movie will abandon the gimmick altogether. Rarely does one have the acute, real-time experience of watching a film recognize that one of its principal stylistic flourishes is so lame that it must be summarily discarded.

6. But back to Lucy. Upstairs she meets Jang, who is the kind of businessman who brutally murders people while wearing a $10,000 suit, and then rinses the gore off his hands with Evian. (He’s played by South Korean actor Choi Min-sik, of Oldboy fame.) Jang speaks no English, nor do any of the many flunkies attending him, which seems odd for a big-time Taipei businessman. So he calls an interpreter on the phone in order to communicate with Lucy. He then has her open the case, which contains a crystalline blue powder. His goons wheel in a junkie to test the stuff. After one snort, the junkie starts giggling wildly and they shoot him. Then Jang offers Lucy a “job,” she says no, and one of the goons punches her in the face.

7. It’s around this time that we’re introduced to our secondary star, Morgan Freeman, brought in with the obvious (though wildly unsuccessful) mission of lending scientific and philosophical gravitas to the proceedings. Freeman plays a renowned neuroscientist, “Professor Norman” (no first name necessary), who is delivering a lecture to a packed crowd of well-heeled attendees. He explains that most species use only 3-5 percent of their “cerebral capacity,” that human beings use 10 percent—a complete falsehood , incidentally—and that dolphins use 20 percent. ( So long, and thanks for all the fish !) He goes so far as to suggest that if we used more of our own brainpower, we’d be able to echolocate too, though he’s mum on the question of whether this would require us to wander around clicking all the time.

8. In addition to offering a variety of silly, daily-calendar-level bromides, Professor Norman makes the point that, when endangered, species focus on self-preservation, but when circumstances are safe, they focus on reproduction. This is an excuse for the second (and last) phase of the wildlife footage, in which we have an opportunity to watch a variety of creatures (rhinoceroses, tropical frogs) humping. I have no doubt that there is a fetish community devoted to such fare, but I suspect it requires a more rarefied taste than that of the average summer moviegoer.

9. Back to Lucy. When she awakes from her punch to the face, she’s taken to a fancy high-rise office suite, offered a drink in a cut-crystal glass, and told she’s had a minor surgery to implant a packet of that blue-powder drug, called CPH4, in her abdomen. She and a trio of other mules are to smuggle the drugs back to their home countries, where they’ll be retrieved by Jang’s men.

9a. A side note: When told about her unwanted surgery, Lucy replies “I don’t care about the scar.” Attentive viewers may recall that Johansson made light of a nearly identical injury/blemish in Captain America: The Winter Soldier . Is this a thing now? Is 2014 the year of the Scar-Jo abdominal scar?

10. Lucy is inexplicably taken to a cell that is as dingy as the office suite was opulent. There, a guard sexually harasses her and then kicks her in the stomach exactly where the packet of drugs is stashed . You’d think that a massively well-financed international drug cartel would remember to tell its heavies not to do this. The drug seeps into her system, and onscreen text shows us that she has now hit 20 percent of her cerebral capacity. Alas, she does not start echolocating. Instead, she immediately begins to levitate. (Take that, dolphins!)

11. As the movie progresses, we will regularly be kept abreast of Lucy’s increasing cerebral capacity (30 percent! 60 percent!). It’s a useful tool, enabling viewers to judge just how much more of the movie they will have to endure before she hits 100 and it’s over.

12. A non-comprehensive list of the powers Lucy acquires over the course of the film: perfect marksmanship, extreme agility, and instantaneous reflexes; the ability to control TVs and cell phones from thousands of miles away; immunity to pain and fear; telepathy, telekinesis, and clairvoyance; expertise in driving a car really fast into oncoming traffic; teleportation across time and space; and the capacity to alter her existing body parts or grow new ones. The one power she doesn’t seem to have—oddly, given the initial levitation—is flight. This is presumably because if she did, Besson would have no excuse to have her exercise her aforementioned car-driving skills to create rampant vehicular mayhem in Paris. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

13. So, to recap: A small amount of CPH4 makes you giggle. Somewhat more begins giving you all the powers noted above. Does this not make Mr. Jang the most inept criminal mastermind of all time? Why sell the stuff to junkies, when you could use it to create an army of super-soldiers, or to grant yourself god-like powers? And how can it be that no one else in the film, witnessing Lucy’s remarkable paranormal abilities, thinks, “Hey, maybe I should try a little of that CPH4 myself!” Half the film is spent chasing down the packets stashed in the other mules, yet despite rampant opportunities no one other than Lucy ever actually takes any of this all-powerful super-drug.

14. A couple more choice bits from Professor Norman’s speech, which is still being interspersed with the main plot: He notes with self-satisfaction that the human race needs to advance from “evolution to revolution,” which his upscale audience applauds enthusiastically, suggesting that they can’t tell the difference between a genuine insight and a sneaker ad. He also laments that “We don’t know anything more than a dog that watches the moon.” I fear that on the basis of this film it might be plausibly presumed that we actually know less.

15. But back, again, to Lucy and the central plot. She learns Chinese in a few minutes and busts out of her cell and into a hospital. There, she shoots a patient on the operating table and dumps the body onto the floor to make room for the surgeons to instead operate on her to remove the CPH4 from her abdomen. (This is an okay thing for her to do, because she’s also taught herself enough radiology and oncology to be confident that the other patient was going to die anyway.) The very concerned doctors explain to Lucy that CPH4 is a substance that occurs naturally in women during their sixth week of pregnancy (note: it’s not) that gives fetuses the “energy” to build their skeletal structure. How this fits in with everything else we’ve been told about “cerebral capacity” is left to viewers to puzzle out. Moreover, again, how is it that a bunch of random Chinese ER doctors seem to know more about the power and perils of CPH4 than, say, the pharmaceutical industry, the military-industrial complex, and the actual global crime syndicate that is smuggling the drug around the world?

16. While the doctors are operating on Lucy, she calls her mother back in the States. The first thing mom asks is whether Lucy is partying too much, which suggests (along with other hints along the way) that she may have had lifestyle-related issues in the past. Lucy says no, she’s fine, and then proceeds to go on a stream-of-consciousness soliloquy about all the things she can now, thanks to her enhanced cerebral capacity, remember with perfect accuracy—every kiss mom ever gave her, a cat they had when she was 1 year old, etc. It all culminates with this doozy: “I remember the taste of your milk in my mouth.” (Needless to say, this is a line that I will spend the remainder of the summer trying to un-remember.) The truly crazy part, however, is that after this long, super-creepy monologue, Lucy’s mom doesn’t ask the question that any parent in the world would ask under the circumstances: “Are you on drugs?” Instead, it’s just: Thanks for calling, hon. Great to catch up. Kudos on that whole recovered memory about the taste of my breast milk.

17. Lucy busts back into Jang’s place, stabs him through both hands, and reads his mind to discover the destinations of her three fellow mules, specifically Paris, Berlin, and Rome. My first thought was that Besson assumed that these are the only European cities with which an American audience would be familiar. But no, it’s worse than that: When the mules arrive at their stops, onscreen text announces “Paris—France,” “Berlin—Germany,” and “Rome—Italy.” This is doubtless to assist dimly provincial Americans who might otherwise have thought the mules were all headed for Texas, which has its own Paris , Berlin , and Rhome .

18. Lucy calls a policeman in Paris and tells him to alert law enforcement in the other two cities. She also gets in touch with Professor Norman, who is conveniently visiting Paris himself. She tells him that she’ll be at his door in 12 hours, which is impressive, given that a nonstop flight from Taipei to Paris takes a couple hours more than that and she hasn’t even headed to the airport yet. Is she bending time? Using her mind to make commercial airlines move faster? Put me on a flight with that girl!

19. Okay, Lucy’s not even at 30 percent yet, and this exercise is already beginning to feel as lengthy and punishing as watching the movie itself. So let’s start wrapping things up by noting that from here out, almost nothing of narrative consequence occurs. After a brief interlude in which Lucy starts disintegrating on her flight, she arrives safely in Paris and drives past the Tuileries at ill-advised velocity, causing a large number of presumably fatal car wrecks. She, the crime lord Jang, the other mules, her new policeman friend, and about 500 French cops and Asian gangsters converge on a hospital, where the latter two groups shoot at one another interminably, except for a brief lull when Lucy intervenes and makes everybody float through the air helplessly. She meets Professor Norman and some colleagues of his who, despite their accumulated scientific wisdom, do nothing except gape at how awesome she is and then help her to take all the CPH4 in order to crank it up to 11 and achieve 100 percent cerebral capacity.

20. Along the way, Lucy explains that “sounds are music that I can understand, like fluids.” I just had to get that line in. There are a dozen others nearly as bad/good.

21. She kisses the French policeman as a “reminder” of her humanity.

22. At 70 percent, Lucy starts vomiting pure energy and light.

23. At 80 percent, she grows slithery black tendrils and transports Professor Norman and his colleagues with her into an all-white limbo, kind of like where Harry Potter went when he was dead in that last movie.

24. At 90 percent, she begins journeying through space and time while wearing a black cocktail dress and sitting in a cut-rate ergonomic office chair. (She couldn’t at least conjure herself a nice Aeron ?) She visits Times Square, meets some American Indians, and encounters dinosaurs constructed out of CGI so primitive they look like a first-generation game on a Nintendo DSi.

25. 99 percent …

26. At 100 percent, Lucy vanishes out of her cocktail dress at the exact moment that an inconceivably still-alive Jang shows up to shoot her. What has become of our heroine? One of the random scientists gasps, “Look! The computer—it’s moving.” And indeed the machine, which is now also sporting slithery black tendrils, is forming something new, an object that it wants to offer to Professor Norman. It’s slender and obsidian and dotted with shimmering points of light. Is it some kind of otherworldly totem or talisman? No, it’s a … flash drive.

I promise that I am not making this up.

Johansson closes the movie with a voiceover echoing the one that opened the film: “Life was given to us a billion years ago. Now you know what to do with it.”

That’s right. What we are meant to “do” with this precious gift of life, our highest destiny and the final stage of human development, is to take massive quantities of drugs so that we can all leave our mortal flesh behind and evolve into glittery disco flash drives. Now you know.

Update, March 2015: If you enjoyed this, you may want to take a look at my spoilereview of the Sean Penn vanity action flick The Gunman.

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Jeff daniels’ new netflix show sounds like a huge improvement from his 26% rt crime drama on amazon.

Jeff Daniels has a new show premiering on Netflix, A Man in Full, and it seems like a major improvement from his most recent television series.

Jeff Daniels returns to TV with new Netflix show A Man In Full, based on Tom Wolfe's novel- premieres on May 2, 2024.
A Man In Full boasts a strong cast including Diane Lane and Lucy Liu, creating buzz for what could be a successful series revival for Daniels.
With a chance to redeem his recent Rotten Tomatoes flop American Rust, A Man In Full may become a binge-worthy hit for fans of Jeff Daniels.

Iconic actor Jeff Daniels has a new series coming to Netflix in May 2024 called A Man In Full , and luckily, this show looks much better than his most recent release, which earned an unfortunate Rotten Tomatoes score. Jeff Daniels has been a film and television star since the 1980s, starting his career with movies such as The Purple Rose of Cairo, Something Wild, and Heartburn. Since then, he has appeared in a significant number of truly iconic projects, like Dumb and Dumber, Steven Jobs, Looper, and The Martian. Now, he is premiering his newest television series.

A Man In Full is a limited series based on a novel of the same name by Tom Wolfe. The story follows real estate mogul Charlie Croker, who begins to be targeted by enemies when he goes bankrupt . Croker is played by Jeff Daniels, while the rest of A Man In Full's cast includes Diane Lane, William Jackson Harper, and Lucy Liu. The series is set to premiere all six of its episodes on May 2, 2024 . A Man In Full is far from the first Tom Wolfe book to miniseries adaptation , and this could help the show succeed.

Newsroom Opening Monologue Saved Jeff Daniels’ Career

Jeff daniels' a man in full looks like his best tv show since the looming tower, a man in full has a lot going for it.

What makes A Man In Full so exciting is that it seems like it could be a successful series, and it would Jeff Daniels' first since 2018's The Looming Tower . Though Daniels has appeared in quite a bit of television, not all of his projects have done well. For example, The Looming Tower was a critically acclaimed series that received award nominations, however the three series that he has done since have gone under the radar . Even if they were well-received, they didn't make any sort of splash. But now, A Man In Full could change this Jeff Daniels trend.

After The Looming Tower, Jeff Daniels appeared in Washington, The Comey Rule, and American Rust.

A Man In Full has several things going for it. First and foremost, it has a strong cast made up of very well-known and beloved actors, and also some newcomers . Typically, this type of mixture helps make a television series seem reliable, but also keeps audiences intrigued with new faces. Furthermore, A Man In Full is based on a Tom Wolfe story, and the prolific author almost certainly has fans that are eager to see this story come to life . Altogether, A Man In Full has the making of a riveting and bingeable Netflix series.

A Man In Full Can Redeem American Rust's Rotten Tomatoes Disappointment For Jeff Daniels

American rust earned a 26% on rotten tomatoes.

Another great part of A Man In Full is that, if it does become successful, it can make up for Jeff Daniels' most recent television flop. Since 2021, the actor has starred in the crime drama, America Rust, which sees Daniels play a chief of police who investigates murder charges against the son of the woman he loves . Although the series was renewed for a second season, it currently holds a 26% on Rotten Tomatoes, hinting that the show may be at its end.

Critics feel that American Rust has a talented cast, but the story simply does not hold.

Despite this disappointment, Jeff Daniels has his American Rust replacement, and it's coming soon. In the coming weeks, audiences can get their fill of Jeff Daniels in A Man In Full . And hopefully, the series will live up to fans' expectations. Not only can it make up for American Rust's failure, but it can also become a new favorite among Netflix viewers and Jeff Daniels' fans.

A Man in Full

Movie Reviews

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Fantasy films aimed at kids don’t have to have political messages, but when they do, they should either be internally consistent, or work through the contradictions in terms that kids can apply to the real world. “Zootopia,” a fantasy set in a city where predators and prey live together in harmony, is a funny, beautifully designed kids’ film with a message that it restates at every turn. But if you think about that message for longer than five minutes, it doesn’t merely fall apart, it invites a reading that is almost surely contrary to the movie’s seemingly enlightened spirit: discrimination is wrong, but stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason, and it’s not easy for members of a despised class to overcome the reasons why the majority despises them, so you gotta be patient.

Ginnifer Goodwin (“Big Love”) voices Bunny Hops, a small town rabbit who’s told that she can’t be a police officer in Zootopia because there’s never been a rabbit police officer. (The job tends to be done by predators and large herbivores—like a water buffalo that’s become a police captain, voiced by Idris Elba.) Hops makes it through police training anyway and gets assigned to meter maid duty, to the relief of her carrot farmer parents ( Bonnie Hunt and Don Lake ), who gave her fox repellent as a going-away present. They had good reason to give her fox repellent: the fox is one of the rabbit’s mortal enemies, and when Judy was child, a fox cornered her at a county fair, insulted her for being a bunny, and slashed her face with his paw. (This is a slightly more intense kid-flick than you might expect, given how many adorable animals are in it.)

Of course Hops ends up partnered with a red fox named Nick Wilde ( Jason Bateman ), a small-time hustler who reluctantly helps her investigate the disappearances of a dozen predators. I won’t reveal exactly what the mystery is here (it’s a pretty good one) except to say that it invites kids and parents to talk about nature versus nurture, and the origins and debilitating effect of stereotypes.

But this turns out to be not such a great thing once you get deeper into the movie. Because people are not animals, I dread thinking about the “logical” conclusions to which such conversations will lead. The film isn’t wrong to say that carnivores are biologically inclined to want to eat herbivores, that bunnies reproduce prolifically, the sloths are slow-moving (they work at the DMV here), that you can take the fox out of the forest but you can’t take forest out of the fox, and so on. If you think about all this as an analogy for the world we live in (particularly if we live in a melting-pot big city like Zootopia) and and then ask yourself which racial or ethnic or societal groups (cops, businesspeople, city bureaucrats) are “predators” and which are “prey” (for purposes of metaphor translation), you see the problem. "Zootopia" pretty much rubber-stamps whatever worldview parents want to pass on to their kids, however embracing or malignant that may be. I can imagine an anti-racist and a racist coming out of this film, each thinking it validated their sense of how the world works.

“Zootopia” is constantly asking its characters to look past species stereotypes, and not use species-ist language or repeat hurtful assumptions. “Only a bunny can call another bunny ‘cute,’” Hops warns a colleague It’s filled with moments that are about overcoming or enduring discrimination. “Never let them see that they get to you,” Wilde advises Hops. And there are acknowledgments of the destructive self-hatred that discrimination can cause. Many of the animals make self-deprecating jokes at the expense of stereotypes about their species (such as Hops volunteering to do math for Wilde, telling him, "If there's one thing we bunnies are good at, it's multiplying"), and there's a fairly intense flashback which reveals that Wilde became a hustler because other animals hazed him as a pup while repeating anti-fox stereotypes, and responded by embracing his species' caricature and becoming the foxiest fox anyone had seen. This all seems clever and noble until you realize that all the stereotypes about various animals are to some extent true, in particular the most basic one: carnivores eat herbivores because it's in their nature. (Yes, readers, I know, there are tigers who've been taught to snuggle with lambs, and I've seen the same memes with cats and dogs snuggling that you have; I mean in general.)

It might seem weird that I’m dwelling on this aspect of “Zootopia,” which is directed by Byron Howard & Rich Moore and co-directed by Jared Bush , because the movie is entertaining. The thriller plot, which borrows rather generously from “48 HRS” and every cop drama involving governmental conspiracy, is smartly shaped It’s hard to imagine any child or adult failing to be amused and excited by parts of it. The compositions and lighting are more thoughtful than you tend to get in a 3-D animated film starring big-eyed animals who speak with the voices of celebrities. And there are a few sections that are transportingly lovely, in particular any sequence involving the pop star Gazelle (voiced by Shakira), and Hops' high-speed train ride towards and through Zootopia, which introduces the city's different terrains (including frozen tundra and misty rainforest) while leaving room for subsequent bits of spelunking (a foot chase through rodent town lets Hops know what it feels like to be a giant). Some of the biggest laughs come from obvious gags that you know the writers couldn't resist, such as the bit where Idris' water buffalo captain says they can't start the morning briefing without acknowledging the elephant in the room. If you decide not to think about the metaphor that the film is built around, it's an enjoyable diversion, made with great skill.

Still: is it too much to ask that a film that wears its noble intentions like a jangling neck collar be able to withstand scrutiny? If "Zootopia" were a bit vaguer, or perhaps dumber and less pleased with itself, it might have been a classic, albeit of a very different, less reputable sort. As-is, it's a goodhearted, handsomely executed film that doesn't add up in the way it wants to.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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Zootopia (2016)

Rated G for some thematic elements, rude humor and action.

108 minutes

Ginnifer Goodwin as Lieutenant Judy Hopps (voice)

Jason Bateman as Nick Wilde (voice)

Shakira as Gazelle (voice)

Idris Elba as Chief Bogo (voice)

Octavia Spencer as Mrs. Otterson (voice)

J.K. Simmons as Mayor Lionheart (voice)

Alan Tudyk as Duke Weaselton (voice)

Jenny Slate as Bellwether (voice)

Bonnie Hunt as Bonnie Hopps (voice)

Tommy Lister as Finnick (voice)

Tommy Chong as Yax (voice)

Kristen Bell as Priscilla (voice)

Katie Lowes as Dr. Madge Honey Badger (voice)

Josh Dallas as Frantic Pig (voice)

John DiMaggio as Jerry Jumbeaux Jr. (voice)

Nate Torrence as Officer Clawhauser (voice)

Maurice LaMarche as Mr. Big (voice)

Kath Soucie as Young Nick Wilde (voice)

Mark Smith as Officer McHorn (voice)

Byron Howard

Co-Director

Phil Johnston

Writer (story)

Jennifer Lee
Jim Reardon

Writer (head of story)

Josie Trinidad

Writer (additional story material)

Dan Fogelman

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Lucy movie review & film summary (2014)
Advertisement. Nevertheless: "Lucy" is a fun, confident work. It's fast and tight and playful even when it's sadistic and violent, which is often. It lasts about 90 minutes and change but feels longer in a good way, because every second is packed tight. It's full of itself, yet it still keeps winking at you.
"Lucy" by Luc Besson: Film Review: [Essay Example], 514 words
Essay grade: Good. "Lucy" is a 2014 English-language French science fiction thriller film written and directed by Luc Besson and produced by his wife Virginie Besson-Silla for his company EuropaCorp. Shot in Taipei, Paris, and New York City, the movie features Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman, Choi Min-sik, and Amr Waked.
Lucy review
The movie itself can barely contain her. Lucy is hopping across millennia; she has her sights set on the cosmos. At the rate she's going, she should reach the outer edge of the galaxy in about 90 ...
Lucy, film review: Scarlett Johansson will blow your mind in Luc
A decade ago, Luc Besson seemed burned out as a film-maker. There was talk of his retirement. The director of Nikita and Léon was reduced to making animated features (the wretched Arthur and the ...
Lucy (2014 film)
Lucy is a 2014 English-language French science fiction action film written and directed by Luc Besson for his company EuropaCorp, and produced by his wife, Virginie Besson-Silla.It is an English-language film shot in Taipei, Paris, and New York City.It stars Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman, Choi Min-sik, and Amr Waked.Johansson portrays the titular character, a woman who gains psychokinetic ...
REVIEW: I Love Lucy
The French writer-director's sci-fi action movie stars Scarlett Johansson as a woman whose use of her full intellectual potential makes her a kick-ass superhuman
Lucy (2014)
Synopsis. Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) is a 25-year-old American woman living and studying in Taipei, Taiwan. She is tricked into working as a drug mule by her new boyfriend, whose employer, Mr. Jang, is a Korean mob boss and drug lord. Lucy delivers a briefcase to Mr. Jang (Choi Min-Sik) containing a highly valuable synthetic drug called CPH4.
Lucy (2014)
89 min. Release Date. 07/25/2014. A film dependent on the myth that we use only 10 percent of our brain, and further driven by the notion of unlocking 100 percent of the brain's potential, Lucy, by writer-director Luc Besson, taps into the possibilities more than Limitless, another story about the same subject, but succeeds only in delivering ...
In 'Lucy,' Scarlett Johansson Transforms Into a Superwoman
Lucy. Directed by Luc Besson. Action, Sci-Fi, Thriller. R. 1h 29m. By Manohla Dargis. July 24, 2014. Thank goodness (or the goddess) for male directors who dig strong female characters. Whatever ...
Movie Review: Lucy : NPR
Anyway, Lucy feels like the pre-chewed multiplex companion piece to that art house provocation, and a victory lap for its fascinating star. It isn't, how you say, smart, but — like last month's ...
Lucy Movie Ending, Explained: How does Lucy Help the professor?
Lucy 2014 Ending, Explained: Lucy is an American action thriller with many undertones of spirituality laced into action sequences, the characterization of a super-human female who unlocks every cell in her brain. The film is a close look into the brain's functionality that works on a level unknown to humankind. It is fiction supplying enough thrill for us to understand and align with the ...
Lucy
Lucy is an ambitious film in which writer and director Luc Besson weds his love for women heroines in action dramas with a newfound interest in the fantastic powers of the human brain. He describes Lucy as "an entertaining film with a philosophical point of view." Scarlett Johansson stars as Lucy, a wayward young woman whose drug dealing ...
Luc Besson's Surprisingly Metaphysical "Lucy"
July 25, 2014. The early trailer for Luc Besson's new film, "Lucy," promised giddy digital wizardry, and the movie delivers, in a way that surprised me. I saw that it would have a pulp ...
Lucy
SEC pays whistleblower $279mn in largest-ever award; Wagner chief blames Moscow for faltering war effort; WHO says Covid-19 emergency is over; China's foreign minister to hold talks with the Taliban
Lucy (2014) : Movie Plot Ending Explained
Lucy Plot Explained. Scarlett Johansson plays Lucy, a student living in Taipei. Her boyfriend tricks her into working for his Korean mob boss. Her job is to transport a new type of drug CPH4 which has been placed into her stomach through surgery. This is a make-belief drug which is planned to be sold in Europe.
(PDF) Lucy: A Film Review
Soon enough the movie itself experienced an onslaught of positive and critical reviews which led to its rise of popularity even more. II. Body Lucy is a movie that follows a story of a 25 year old American woman named Lucy. The movie begins with her in a bar partying, soon enough Lucy was tricked to be a drug mule by her new boyfriend Richard.
Lucy Summary
Lucy and the four girls accustom themselves to the daily routine at the lake house, where they walk through the forest to the beach. At the lake house, Lucy meets Dinah 's brother Hugh. Lucy and Hugh instantly find a connection and become lovers. At the end of the summer, however, they part ways.
Lucy Movie Review, Thoughts and Analysis : r/Lucy
Just like God, Lucy is all-knowing, everywhere, and undying. It is supposedly a myth that we use only 10% of our brain capacities, but more accurately put we use only 10% of our brain's energy resources. This is because this is enough for our daily activities. However, if we were to access greater than lets say 30% and increasingly more closer ...
Wendy and Lucy movie review & film summary (2009)
Wendy (Michelle Williams) and Lucy (Lucy). I know so much about Wendy, although this movie tells me so little. I know almost nothing about where she came from, what her life was like, how realistic she is about the world, where her ambition lies. But I know, or feel, everything about Wendy at this moment: stranded in an Oregon town, broke, her ...
Lucy : The Dumbest Movie Ever Made About Brain Capacity
By Christopher Orr. As the brain capacity of Scarlett Johansson's character, Lucy, rises, all semblance of logic plummets. ( Universal Pictures) July 25, 2014. Every now and then a movie comes ...
I Am Sam movie review & film summary (2002)
As the film ends, the issue is in doubt. "I Am Sam" is aimed at audiences who will relate to the heart-tugging relationship between Sam and Lucy (and young Dakota Fanning does a convincing job as the bright daughter). Every device of the movie's art is designed to convince us Lucy must stay with Sam, but common sense makes it impossible to go ...
Waste Land movie review & film summary (2011)
Directed by. Lucy Walker. Joao Jardim. Karen Harley. Across the world's largest garbage dump, near Rio de Janeiro, the pickers crawl with their bags and buckets, seeking treasures that can be recycled: plastics and metals, mostly, but anything of value. From the air, they look like ants.
Jeff Daniels' New Netflix Show Sounds Like A Huge Improvement From His
Summary. Jeff Daniels returns to TV with new Netflix show A Man In Full, based on Tom Wolfe's novel- premieres on May 2, 2024. A Man In Full boasts a strong cast including Diane Lane and Lucy Liu, creating buzz for what could be a successful series revival for Daniels. With a chance to redeem his recent Rotten Tomatoes flop American Rust, A Man ...
Zootopia movie review & film summary (2016)
The thriller plot, which borrows rather generously from "48 HRS" and every cop drama involving governmental conspiracy, is smartly shaped It's hard to imagine any child or adult failing to be amused and excited by parts of it. The compositions and lighting are more thoughtful than you tend to get in a 3-D animated film starring big-eyed ...

"Lucy" by Luc Besson: Film Review

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