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Matt Vs. Lucy


Scarlet Johanson has enjoyed an impressive string of success thanks in part to her role as Black Widow in the Avengers movie franchise.In her newest film Lucy, she stars as a woman who is implanted with a drug that allows her to access up to 100% of her brain. Lucy is a French film starring Johanson, Morgan Freeman, Mar Waked, and Choi Min-Sik. Lucy is kidnapped by ruthless Korean gangsters who operate a human trafficking ring that uses tourists as drug mules. During a fight with her captors, the drug pouch implanted inside her ruptures and she is inundated with the potent pills. As explained by Morgan Freeman, this allows her to manipulated objects with her mind, learn information rapidly and even travel through time. The film revolves around Lucy gradually unlocking greater portions of her brain while hunting down the Korean gangsters that kidnapped her.


The main theme of Lucy is the passing down of knowledge to the next generation. The cycle of life and death, the concept of mortality are also key concepts. As she masters her new abilities. she finds that the experimental drug is killing her and there is now a race to the clock.  Lucy contacts  a expert on brain evolution played by Morgan Freeman in hopes of seeking guidance and a way of documenting her now revolutionary discoveries about life. She  knows that she must pass on her newly found knowledge before she dies. The film was slightly heavy handed with this theme but it got the point across and theme is a subtle sense of humor and play present throughout. There are rather gratuitous scenes of violence which show this darker humor well.The name Lucy itself refers to the earliest known proto human specimen also known as Lucy.

 The film while entertaining was not especially memorable reflecting back a few weeks later. The characters are fairly one dimensional and the special effects aren't incredibly catching. I would say that I did enjoy the parts involving time travel and how over the top certain Paris chase scenes are. Lucy overall is a solid film that will forever be confused with Johnny Depp's Transcendence which touches upon similar ground. In the deluge of summer movies, I fear that despite Scarlet Johanson's solid performance, Lucy may have been simply buried.
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