Lucy

Since his career began, Luc Besson has favored spectacle over storytelling. But the innovative techniques, arresting imagery, and taboo subjects of his early films made Besson one of the most exciting European art-house/action directors of the 1980s whose style came to be known as “Cinéma du look.”  He developed his distinctive directorial flair in movies like Subway (1985), Le Grand Bleu (1988), Nikita (1990), and Léon: The Professional (1994): sumptuous cinematic experiences that welcomed multiple viewings to fully absorb everything they had to offer. But his later directorial efforts, like The Fifth Element (1997), The Messenger (1999), and The Family (2013), lack the substance, splendor, and fun of his earlier pictures. I've steered clear of most of the big-budget vehicles Besson has written and/or produced since the mid-‘90s, including the various series of Taken, Transporter, and Arthur and the Invisibles movies, because it seemed to me that his work was devolving into the disposable comic-book fantasy fare that already comprises far too much of our contemporary cinematic landscape. 

Lucy, Besson's latest film as writer/producer/director, has the potential for a return to his early glory, but the end result is an instantly forgettable piece of brainless fluff, all style and no substance. The flimsy plot revolves around a foxy American girl (Scarlett Johansson) leading a directionless existence in Taipei. Through a contrived and uninspired series of events, she accidentally ingests an overdose of a new synthetic drug that enables her to use more and more of her cerebral capacity, far in excess of the ten percent most of us are supposedly limited to. This transforms her from an aimless knockabout to an invincible super-babe who can levitate, read minds, move objects with telekinesis, absorb information faster than a computer, suppress the sensation of pain, and, eventually, travel through time--all while wearing a tight dress and high heels and toting a gun. She's the ultimate femme fatale for twelve year-old audiences that only reads comic books. 

It’s hard to avoid comparisons to Limitless (2011), a thriller in which a drug imbues Bradley Cooper's character with superhuman powers: both films present shallow and absurd depictions of how human beings might advance if only we had access to better recreational pharmaceuticals. But the film Lucy most recalls, and tries to live up to, is Besson’s own Nikita (released as La Femme Nikita in America), in which an oppressive state turns a burnt-out teenage gang member (Anne Parillaud) into an elegant, professional female assassin. Nikita was a revelation in style, and it represents the peak of Besson’s achievements in visual composition, lighting, and editing, as well as his finest musical collaboration with the Eurotrash synth-pop virtuoso Éric Serra. But slick as Nikita’s production values may have been, its study of contemporary gender politics in a violent, authoritarian world was far more impressive and powerful. Parillaud’s Nikita was a trend-setter for the myriad of female action heroes that would follow, but what made this hyper-stylized mash-up of James Bond and Eliza Doolittle so effective was that her story raised potent moral, political, and introspective questions. Lucy, for all its philosophical, metaphysical, and pseudoscientific pretensions, revolves around nothing more than how cool it looks when a sexy girl flies through the air and shoots things with absolute precision in slow motion. 

Even La Femme Johansson cannot convince us that there is a tragic or sagacious soul to care about inside her two-dimensional superhero. Besson tries to make this mindless shoot-'em-up seem deep and intelligent by incorporating sham science and popular (though spurious) notions about the human brain and quantum physics, but his effort is laughable. Although the director clearly intended this film to be a mind-blowing, game-changing event, it's evident from the first scenes that Besson is trafficking in the same scenarios, images, costumes, props, and stock characters of literally hundreds of other interchangeable movies. Great science fiction films like 2001: A Space Odyssey and even mediocre ones like The Matrix are iconic and revolutionary because they present us with images and ideas we’ve never seen or considered before, but Lucy's philosophical questions are only stimulating if you’ve already numbed your brain well below its ten percent cerebral capacity. This film is by no means the next genre-busting masterpiece of futuristic sci-fi cinema, and whenever that film does finally make it into theaters, one thing that will set it apart from the pack will be a conspicuous absence of Korean gangsters in black suits, skinny ties, and sunglasses shooting guns in fancy hotels.