LUCY (2014)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY:  *poor* 

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure *

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, metaphysical* 

I won't spend a lot of time on Luc Besson's disappointing LUCY except to say that it might have helped had he gone back and read more mind-blowing French comic books, the same type that inspired him to his signature work, 1997's FIFTH ELEMENT.

The set-up for LUCY has potential. The title character (Scarlet Johanssen), a young girl going to school in Taiwan, is inveigled into making a delivery to a clique of Korean gangsters. They subject Lucy to an operation and place a packet of rare drugs in her abdomen in order to sneak the forbidden substances past customs; then she and some other unwilling drug-mules are scheduled to be flown out of Taiwan to the gangsters' confederates. The young woman seems to have no way to go but down.

As it happens, a few of the handlers charged with getting Lucy out of Taiwan decide to take advantage of her, and when she resists, she earns a kick in the stomach. The blow bursts the packet and her system is infused with the drugs, an artificial version of a natural growth-hormone. Besson's script hypothesizes that the designer-drug unleashes a level of brain-capacity that most humans never use, so that Lucy acquires phenomenal psychic powers. She gets free of her captors and sows a little vengeance on gang-boss Mr. Jang, though she lets him live-- apparently for no good reason but because the script needs a villain to continue providing resistance.  Her main project, however, is to overtake the other drug-mules and harvest the drugs they carry, in order to (a) keep the hormone from killing her, and (b) to boost herself to the full 100% capacity, so that she can implicitly transcend time and space.

As an action-thriller, LUCY is adequate. Unfortunately, despite a script that gives scientist Professor Norman (Morgan Freeman) a lot of ponderous dialogue about evolution and the time-space continuum, Besson's rendering of these profundities is merely banal.  Besson's idea of deep meaning is to show assorted shots of animals in the wild, perhaps with the intention of illustrating the vast complexity of the ecosphere. But frankly, I've seen Disney nature programs that provided better illustration of life's impressive variations. Besson's understanding of metaphysical issues is similarly derivative and undermines the potential of the basic idea.