Lucy

One Girl You Will Not Want To Mess With

Director: Luc Besson
Release Date: 2014
Rating: 15
Running Time: 85 mins
Genre: Sci-fi/Action/Thriller
Actors: Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman, Min-ski Choi

If you haven't heard the name Luc Besson, you would surely be familiar with his work. He's director, screenwriter and producer who has been behind some big blockbusters over the past two decades: Leon, The Fifth Element, The Family, Taken, The Transporter, District 13; the list can go on and on. So now the auteur has decided to, what feels like, take on Limitless with this sci-fi thriller that shows us what could be possible if we could access 100% of our brain power, 10 times more than we can actually use.

Combining two stories, we begin with Lucy, a naive 25 year old girl working in Taiwan, who is conned into delivering a briefcase to a kingpin drug lord. Unaware of what might happen, Lucy enters into the nightmarish world and is consequently forced to be a drug mule after having a bag containing a new drug inserted into her and made to board a plane to Paris in order to successfully smuggle the drug into Europe. However, plans begin to change when the bag ends up leaking the drug into Lucy's blood, causing it to have unbelievable results. Lucy then looks for the help of neuro scientists and lecturer Morgan Freeman for some form of explanation as to what's happening, but it's not long before Lucy after only a few hours gains more knowledge than him and could potentially have the answers he's been looking for all his life.

Though this film has an exciting plot line, I feel like it almost tries too hard to confuse audiences and to be quite honest, at the end of the film I wanted to put it straight back to the beginning and watch it all over again, as there was just too much information to take it. There's no denying it was an incredibly interesting film that makes you think about life and how the mind works, but this film made mine work a little bit too hard and will take several viewings to fully understand everything Luc Besson is throwing at us.

Leaving most of the exposition down to Morgan Freeman, lecturing a roomful of students in Paris, we learn the brains capabilities in animals and humans a like and we're taught about the significance of the brains capabilities along with what could happen if this could expand. Through unique cinematography in action films, we're shown real life footage of animals and primates representing the evolutionary scale of what we've achieved.

Scarlett Johansson is left to the action side of the film and proves herself as a more than capable badass. After seeing Johansson in other films such as the Marvel series as Black Widow, the actress pushing thirty is certainly making her mark as a female action hero and still at quite a young age, taking the reigns from Angelena Jolie, Uma Therman and Sigornier Weaver previously, showing us that Johansson could just be the female action hero to look out for at the moment.Hopefully now she's settling into these rather badass roles, this won't be the last we see of Scarlett Johansson kicking some ass.

6/10