Lucy (Cinema Screening)

(Spoilers)

Lucy featured in my ‘Most Anticipated Films of the rest of 2014’ article that I posted at about the half way point in the year. The trailers had intrigued me and recently Scarlett Johansson has been in some great films, so her involvement I thought could only mean good things. I also noticed striking resemblances to the 2011 film Limitless. I watched this movie in preparation for Lucy and wasn’t very impressed but did Lucy fare any better?

Lucy started well, I enjoyed the opening scenes in which Lucy was captured and I thought Johansson’s performance was great although I wasn’t fussed on some of the script in these scenes. The cut away scenes re-enforcing the idea that Lucy was being hunted like prey were interesting although I am not quite sure if they worked or not. Morgan Freeman was brilliant as always and I actually think this was one of his stronger recent performances, he was able to enhance this film a heck of a lot. After Lucy is effected by the drug her performance becomes less interesting as her character changes to one with less variation, although this isn’t to say that it is a bad performance. My favourite scene was the one that was set to classical music which sees Lucy confronting the drug boss, Mr. Jang (Choi Min-sik) whom gets her into this mess. If the film had featured more scenes like this it would have been much more entertaining. I did enjoy the Korean mob scenes, they added some interest for me and thank goodness they were included as otherwise there would have been very little to entertain.

Overall Lucy was just a bit of a mess, for me it never really got going and then it was over. There wasn’t a lot of point to the film as we find out what is going to happen fairly early on. We know that Lucy is simply aiming to pass on her knowledge, there aren’t any twists or any unexpected conclusions, this was a shame as Lucy really could have done with some shocking revelation. I wasn’t fussed on the scenes in which Lucy traveled through time either, especially the one in which she visits the first know human, I thought this scene was awful and I just really couldn’t take it seriously. 90 minutes was not a long enough running time, even and extra 10 minutes would have benefited Lucy as some explanation could have been littered through the film as to just what was going on. Lucy had the wrong focus, im my opinion gaining and passing on knowledge was never going to make for that much of an interesting story. Instead I would have loved to have seen Lucy wage a one woman war against the mob, this would have made for such a badass movie, there were elements of this but for me this needed to be the focus.

Neither Limitless or Lucy have inspired me much, this plot about unlocking the brains potential just doesn’t seem to have much potential itself. Lucy had moments that were great however most of these were featured in the trailer and unfortunately there was too much to contrast this in terms of unexciting, unexplained and unnecessary scenes.

BIGGEST FLAW – Felt like it was over before it began

BIGGEST ACHIEVEMENT – The scene set to classical music was great

Rating – 5/10