I’ve been intrigued by the last few features starring actress Scarlett Johansson.  She’s been on a roll, starring as the Black Widow in The Avengers, then playing a genuine black widow in intriguing (but to my mind ultimately flawed) Under The Skin.  Despite the success of the Marvel related films, as of yet there has been no indication that a Black Widow movie was in the works.  Perhaps it was because of this that Ms. Johansson decided to “take the bull by the horns” and star in her own action/adventure film.

That film, of course, is Lucy.  As directed by Luc Besson, a man who has made a fair amount of pretty damn good action films and produced/co-written a truckload more, the film concerns Lucy (duh), a woman living an aimless life in Hong Kong who, at the movie’s opening, is being implored by her current squeeze to deliver a suitcase into a building.

Lucy knows something is off by her boyfriend’s request and is very reluctant to do this for him.  That is, until the boyfriend handcuffs her to the case and tells her the key to unlocking it is inside that building.  Not being all that terribly bright (for now) Lucy does what the boyfriend wants and enters the building with said suitcase.  Turns out there are new, experimental drugs inside it and a homicidal Hong Kong crime boss with little patience waiting for them.

Poor Lucy is beaten and drugged, though her fate turns out to be better than her boyfriend’s, and awakens to find that she has been operated on and forcibly turned into a drug mule for the crime boss.  Inside her is one of the bags of drugs she had brought to him.

Fortunately/Unfortunately for her, she is beaten and nearly raped (!!!) in her cell and the bag within her ruptures.  It winds up giving her super-mind powers (what, no one experimented on this drug before hand?!?), and she effectively becomes a superhero out to stop the other drug carriers before her system burns out.

What many wound up objecting to when this film was released was the long ago disproved concept that humans only use 10% of their brain and that if they could use more, they might become like Gods.  If accepting this well discarded premise bothers you, then seeing the mighty Morgan Freeman spout that babble for most of his scenes will undoubtedly make you wince.  A lot given he’s supposed to be this highly intelligent scientist who has devoted his life to researching this nonsensical idea.  Even worse, Mr. Freeman chooses to deliver his silly dialogue soooo daaaaammn sloooowwwwly that I couldn’t help but wonder why the highly evolved Lucy, on time clock as it is, didn’t just jack into his brain and suck out what little she needed (by that point in the film she was capable of this, by the way).

Unfortunately, that is only one of the film’s sins in my eyes.  Luc Besson appears to be trying to make a La Femme Nikita-meets-Inception/2001: A Space Odyssey type film and the mix just didn’t work.  He gives us weird scenes involving predatory animals that hit you over the head with the danger Lucy is in early on, scenes that were unnecessary as we already knew exactly the danger she was in.  He goes further and gives us prehistoric scenes as well, which clues us in to our Lucy’s name being symbolically tied with the prehistoric Australopithecus Lucy.

Why exactly?  I guess the prehistoric Lucy is meant to be the equivalent of the “next level” of evolution just as our modern Lucy will be for us in the present.  Otherwise, it is more unnecessary symbolic overkill, though I’d be the first to admit the scene where (MILD SPOILER!) the two Lucy’s sorta/kinda meet was the emotional high point of this otherwise ridiculous film.

There, I’ve said it: The film is ridiculous.

And not in a good way.

If it isn’t clear already, let me spell it out: Lucy strives mightily to be more than “just” an action film.  And while one can admire the attempt, the end result just doesn’t work for me.

Yes, there are some decent action sequences and the film looks like a million bucks and Scarlett Johansson remains an intriguing screen premise, but let’s face it: The film’s story is hard to take seriously from the get-go and with each passing minute that silliness proved harder and harder to swallow.

Alas, Lucy is a pass for me.