Rating of
2/4
Cerebral and Stupid
Looneymanthegreat - wrote on 07/27/14
Lucy is probably not the movie audiences were expecting to see when they went to the theater this weekend (The movies going to finish the weekend with an estimated 44 million.) It’s weird, stylish, dark and thoughtful. But unfortunately it’s also really stupid.
I’m no scientist, but the leaps in logic here are distracting and unnecessary. This is strictly science fantasy, and the movie’s unfortunate decision to display the (flawed) logic behind the movies terrible hypothesis make this incredibly apparent to anyone who is willing to put even a modicum of thought into it.
I call the movies base concept (That someone could be able to control minds technology and even shape-shift if their cerebral capacity was reached,) the movies hypothesis, because it’s the only part of the movie that really gets through to its audience. Lucy acts like its big and cerebral, but when you tear away the pieces all you see is an attempt to make a silly core concept deeper then it actually is.
To director Luc Besson’s credit, the movie is stylish and well paced. Luc Besson has cut his movie down to a fast paced thriller that moves swiftly enough and ends quickly enough that nobody could possibly get bored with it. There’s never a dull moment, or a moment were character motives become silly or when the movies story feels clunky. If there’s one thing that these Europacorp movies always succeed in, it’s keeping things moving forward.
And if all this movie was trying to be was a fun little thriller, then it would be great, but this movie is supposed to make some kind of great artistic statement, and at that it fails. Besson is trying to say something about human perception of the world, and how limiting it is, but that is never really kept the focus of the movie. He’s trying to paint a character portrait of a woman who has been robbed of her humanity, but we never really get more then bits and pieces. The movie is also full of cuts to various Terrence Malick type sequences, that sometimes seem masturbatory and other times silly; since the movie only comes in just at 90 minutes, I assume these were added to pad out the thing.
I wouldn’t go so far as to call Lucy a bad movie, but it’s kind of a lame one. I can’t imagine anyone who saw the badass looking trailers that they released for this being satisfied with the end project. It’s more frustrating then bad. Too cerebral for the main-stream and too stupid for the art house; Lucy finds itself in no-mans land. The movies got itself a strong opening weekend, but I can’t imagine that word of mouth will be positive enough for it to hold up over the next few weekends.
