The past week, I’ve been going around telling everybody that they should watch Lucy because not only was it the movie that Limitless should have been, it was directed by the same dude who made Liam Neeson’s Taken.  Well, it turns out that only one of those statements were true; director Luc Besson (The Family) was the writer for both Taken movies.

The theatrical trailer looked promising so I was still pretty hyped to see it.

Here’s my round-up:

Please note that there may be spoilers.  Read at your own risk.

THE STORY:

Lucy (Scarlett Johansson – Her) is an American student studying in Taiwan.  Like amy other young girl, she likes to party and through this, she manages to get mixed up with an international drug syndicate, headed by a nefarious Mr. Jang (Min-Sik Choi).  They have sown into her body, along with four others, a kilogram each of a new product called CPH4 that they are going to sell in Berlin, Rome, Paris and America.  Things take a different turn when the bag inside of Lucy leaks but instead of dying in an overdose, the chemical has unlocked the full potential of her cognitive capacity.  With the help of the world’s top researcher on human brain function Professor Norman (Morgan Freeman – Transcendence) and Paris Detective Pierre Del Rio (Amr Waked – Salmon Fishing in the Yemen), Lucy is on a mission to retrieve the three other bags before Mr. Jang and his cronies get a hold of them.

THE GOOD:

1. Scarlett Johansson as a vicious ass-kicking machine.  I’ve never really bought that she was a legitimate action star until this movie.  Sure there was The Avengers and Captain America: The Winter Soldier but to me it’s always felt like a girl trying to join a boy’s club.  Here she was a total bad-ass with almost none of that sexy crap that almost always somehow manages to overpower the action.
2. The gorgeous skyline of Taipei.  I loved how it was shot in such a way that shows its frenetic pace, literally bursting at the seams with life.  While the film didn’t try to hide the ugly side of the city, it also didn’t focus on the poverty, which was a nice change of pace from these types of films.
3. The wit.  The writer-director obviously has a very sharp sense of witticism on him, otherwise there was no way all of those montages would have worked in this movie. The Professor’s lecture, interspersed with scenes of animals hunting, mating or what have you, was more than a little bit in your face, but the technique was pretty effective in driving the point home.
4. The science sounded pretty legit.  As a Doctor Who fan, I had a good time watching the sequences of “time travel” because yes, Lucy, you do make a good point that time is the one true universal measure and nothing else.
5. Julian Rhind-Tutt as The Limey.  It was just one incredibly short scene but it stood out to me because he was incredibly funny and charming.  He definitely provided the much needed levity and I was waiting for him to come back the moment he left the screen.

THE BAD:

1. Detective Del Rio ended up doing a lot of unethical -not to mention illegal- things for Lucy for no apparent reason.  Sure, she posed a legitimate threat to his life because she could snap his neck with a look, but there was never that threat anyway.  I take that he’s just a plot device but I wish the character was written better just so that it would make more sense why he ended up helping her, sacrificing his men’s lives and his job.
2. Unsustained tension.  It was a frakking shame that the tension didn’t hold up for the whole movie.  Things lost its steam around the time that Lucy left the hospital and it’s a sad thing because the confrontation sequence at the hotel – that managed to be a nail biter despite the interpreter on the phone, of all things- was truly a joy to watch.

THE UGLY:

1. Overall feeling of disjointedness.  In the end it felt like two different movies, with different stories that only happened to converge at a small overlap.  The first half was a thriller, where an innocent girl whose life gets turned upside down when she is terrorized to become an unwilling drug mule, while the second half was more sci-fi than anything else, as it reached to explore the universe for an explanation for man’s existence.  They made for equally good watching, but they definitely were not supppsed to be in the same movie.

All in all Lucy was still the movie that Limtless should/could have been.  While it has a lot of excellent things to offer -kick ass action sequences, an excellent performance from the female lead, well-researched and well-presented science to back up its claims- they didn’t blend well enough to make a cohesive film.

THE VERDICT:  6/10.

*All photos are lifted from the film’s IMDB page.