Lucy (2014)

Lucy (2014)

Lucy is a 2014 English-language French science fiction action film written and directed by Luc Besson and produced by his wife Virginie Silla for his company Europacorp. The film was shot in Taipei, Paris and New York City. It stars Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman, Amr Waked and Choi Min-sik. Johansson portrays the title character, a woman who gains psychokinetic abilities when a nootropic drug is absorbed into her bloodstream.

The film was released on July 25, 2014, and became a box office success, grossing over $463 million against a budget of $40 million. It received mainly positive, but also polarized, critical reviews, with praise for Johansson's performance, entertaining or intriguing themes and visuals, and criticism for having a nonsensical plot, especially its focus on the ten percent of brain myth and resulting abilities

Storyline

It was supposed to be a simple job. All Lucy had to do was deliver a mysterious briefcase to Mr. Jang. But immediately Lucy is caught up in a nightmarish deal where she is captured and turned into a drug mule for a new and powerful synthetic drug. When the bag she is carrying inside of her stomach leaks, Lucy's body undergoes unimaginable changes that begins to unlock her mind's full potential. With her new-found powers, Lucy turns into a merciless warrior intent on getting back at her captors. She receives invaluable help from Professor Norman, the leading authority on the human mind, and French police captain Pierre Del Rio.

Plot

Lucy is a 25-year-old American woman living and studying in Taipei, Taiwan. She is tricked into working as a drug mule by her new boyfriend, whose employer, Mr. Jang, is a Korean mob boss and drug lord. Lucy delivers a briefcase to Mr. Jang containing a highly valuable synthetic drug called CPH4. After seeing her boyfriend shot and killed, she is captured. A bag of the drug is forcibly sewn into her abdomen and that of three other drug mules who will also transport the drug for sale in Europe. While Lucy is in captivity, one of her captors kicks her in the abdomen, breaking the bag and releasing a large quantity of the drug into her system. As a result, she begins acquiring increasingly enhanced physical and mental capabilities, such as telepathy, telekinesis, mental time travel, and the ability not to feel pain or other discomforts. She kills off her captors and escapes.

Lucy travels to the nearby Tri-Service General Hospital to get the bag of drugs removed from her abdomen. The bag is successfully removed, and Lucy is told by the operating doctor of the volatile nature of the drug, based on a substance given to fetuses during prenatal development, and its destructive side-effects. Sensing her growing physical and mental abilities, Lucy returns to Mr. Jang's hotel, kills his bodyguards, assaults Mr. Jang, and telepathically extracts the locations of the three remaining drug mules from his brain.

At her shared apartment, Lucy begins researching her condition and contacts a well-known scientist and doctor, Professor Samuel Norman, whose research may be the key to saving her. After Lucy speaks with the professor and provides proof of her developed abilities, she flies to Paris and contacts a local police captain, Pierre Del Rio, to help her find the remaining three packets of the drug. During the plane ride, she starts to disintegrate as her cells destabilize from consuming a sip of champagne, which made her body inhospitable for cellular reproduction. Only by consuming more CPH4 is she able to prevent her total disintegration. Her powers continue to grow, leaving her able to telepathically incapacitate armed police and members from the Korean drug gang. With the help of Del Rio, Lucy recovers the drug and hurries to meet Professor Norman, with whom she agrees to share everything she now knows, after he points out that the main point of life is to pass on knowledge, something for which she now possesses an infinite capacity. Jang and the mob also want the drug and a gunfight ensues with the French police.

In the professor's lab, Lucy discusses the nature of time and life and how people's humanity distorts their perceptions. At her urging, she is intravenously injected with the contents of all three remaining bags of CPH4. Her body begins to metamorphose into a bizarre black substance which behaves like nanites, spreading over computers and other objects in the lab, as she transforms these into an unconventionally shaped, next generation supercomputer that will contain all of her enhanced knowledge of the universe. She then begins a spacetime journey into the past, eventually reaching the oldest discovered ancestor of mankind, implied to be Lucy, and touches fingertips with her. Meanwhile, back in the lab, after an M136 AT4 anti-tank weapon destroys the door, Jang enters and points a gun at Lucy's head from behind. He shoots, but in the instant before the bullet strikes, Lucy reaches 100% of her cerebral capacity and disappears within the spacetime continuum, where she explains that everything is connected and existence is only proven through time. Only her clothes and the black supercomputer are left behind.

Del Rio enters and fatally shoots Jang. Professor Norman takes a black, monolithic flash drive offered by the advanced supercomputer before the computer disintegrates to dust. Del Rio asks Professor Norman where Lucy is, immediately after which, Del Rio's cell phone sounds and he sees a text message: "I AM EVERYWHERE." With an overhead shot, Lucy's voice is heard stating, "Life was given to us a billion years ago. Now you know what to do with it

Cast

• Scarlett Johansson as Lucy
• Morgan Freeman as Professor Samuel Norman
• Choi Min-sik as Mr. Jang
• Amr Waked as Pierre Del Rio
• Julian Rhind-Tutt as the polite English 'baddie'
• Pilou Asbæk as Richard
• Analeigh Tipton as Caroline
• Nicolas Phongpheth as Jii

User Review

If you're expecting a character driven storyline or you're someone that is unable to suspend disbelief for a couple of hours then this movie probably won't be for you.

The storyline is nothing new and has been explored quite a few times, it's basically the concept of are we more or can we be more than what we are.

Whilst they used an idea about the brain that has long since been proved nothing more than a myth it works to drive the concept of the film. I do think with a little thought they could of made this a little bit more believable though if they had just focused on being able to use more of the brains potential rather than "capacity".

Anyway apart from the basic concept that we still do not really understand our brains and what they are capable of everything else in the movie is based a lot in the realm of fantasy. There was a whole lot of things in the movie that could of been done better but even with all those flaws I still found it entertaining.

The only thing that let the film down for me was the ending which even though visually was probably the best part of the film it still felt a little too generic and overdone.

There seems to be a lot of reviews on here that bang on about realism and it being unbelievable etc but if you are going to rate a film on that then recent films like Transformers and all the super hero movies should be rated a 1 because hey a school student getting bitten by a radioactive spider or super sized robots trying to overtake earth is far more believable...

This film is a fantasy sci-fi with great visuals and while not "realistic" or perfectly executed has a thought provoking concept.