It’s always hard at the beginning. A classic is a brief retelling of the plot of the film, which half of those who read already know from the trailer. The other half has been going to the cinema for a long time and wants the author of the text to quickly get to the point in order to compare his opinion with his own.

So everyone knows everything: a girl in the wrong place at the wrong time, some blue substance, the mythical 10% of the brain, which suddenly turns out to be far from the limit… By the way, regarding the 10%, our dear Luc Besson explained in advance that he was well aware of the fallacy of this theory, but nevertheless said that “such an assumption” would be an excellent start for a science fiction film.

So, we have decided on the master’s position: “Lucy” is a science fiction film, which took about 10 years to realize. I’ll even say more: the magnificent Luc Besson, who gave us at least “Leon” and “The Fifth Element,” is positioning his new film as action mixed with philosophy, as an entertaining and smart movie, comparable to Nolan’s “Inception”. The director warned us in an interview that he wanted to “play with the audience,” “challenge them,” and that “if you are an active viewer, you will like the ending, but this is only if you participate in what is happening on the screen.”. Great, let’s start with the last one.

The difficulty in perceiving the picture, according to Besson, lies in the unusual structure of the narrative, which is expressed in periodic inserts, i.e.n. “analog events”: Lucy takes a step towards the plot of the film – we are shown a mouse approaching a mousetrap and so on. Subsequently, according to the director and screenwriter, everything becomes more complicated, “jumps” appear three million years ago, the viewer is shown a monkey, which in our future scientists will call Lucy, and such and such scenes should certainly “give birth to certain ideas in the minds of the audience and lead them in the right direction”..

In fact, the “resets in time” do not fit into the plot of the film at all, where most of the time we still see a variation on the theme of the drug business and the couriers involved in it. Analog events are unnecessarily drawn out and cause mild irritation rather than impact. By the way, the title slogan of the film: “She is the key to the secrets of the Universe” can easily be replaced with this phrase: “A slight irritation, not a hit.”.

This really applies to https://casinoactiononline.co.uk/ everything, take the main character for example. Luc Besson praised the performance of the cutie Scarlett: “she was very nervous because she understood that she would not be able to use anything from her previous arsenal,” “other actresses simply would not have had enough imagination,” “she needed this challenge to play well,” and it was completely contradictory, especially coupled with the first statement: “meeting with other actresses, I felt that they were scared.”. And all the noise turned out to be because of the role of the brick. An absolutely emotionless main character, with a complete lack of purpose and any motivation, which she herself declares in the first third of the film, referring to another open percentage of her brain, while begging for the purpose of her remaining life from a complete stranger Morgan Freeman. Please think about this again: the main character, having overcome the threshold of the plot that was shown to us in the trailer, is whining about further motivation for the entire remaining running time from a character who was previously on the screen for at most ten minutes. You also feel the power of this script, which took ten years to write? It’s good that I didn’t know about this while watching..

As for Johansson’s image to dabbling with blue substances, then the role of a 29-year-old lady, heavily made up, wearing a leopard print fur coat and with a lollipop in her mouth gives more of an impression of a prostitute bickering with her pimp, who does not demonstrate a drop of acting skill, rather than a “completely normal student,” as the director presents her with a simple phrase about “classes”.

Almost all the other characters in the “theater of mild irritation” are in no hurry to save the situation: Morgan Freeman plays Morgan Freeman again, his scientist friends are remembered as nothing more than a blank spot, it is unclear why the introduced French policeman turned out not to be a “reminder” for the main character, but rather served as a source of extras for the final scene.

However, there was one character for whom I personally had high hopes. The inimitable Choi Min Sik (God forgive me), known to most as Oh Dae Su from the original “Oldboy,” endowed “his” mafia boss with all the features that the main character lacks. He has charisma, style, motivation and passions. He experiences human emotions, be it fear, anger, or simple boredom. The antagonist was not just interesting to follow..

damn, I was actually rooting for him the entire movie. If he had been allowed to pull the trigger just a couple of seconds earlier – what an ending would have turned out: the Neanderthals again defeated a higher being that they were unable to understand – I would have enjoyed pondering this ending even after the credits.

The references to old films were also pleasing: the first appearance of the main villain in a gray suit and slightly unshaven, rectangular packages pulled out of his stomach were quite entertaining to notice, of course.

By the way, regarding the packages. The script’s move looked rather ridiculous, in which the intrigue was built up as to what was in the suitcase. Considering that anyone who watched the trailer knew this.

Also, in the film there is simply an indecent number of mistakes: bloody hands/clean hands, blue powder/blue crystals, black hands/non-black hands, the car moves at high speed with the gearshift lever in the “P” (“Park”) position and many, many other, large and small flaws that are unacceptable for a modern film. At least to be noticed with the naked eye and on the first try.

The bottom line is that we have the following: “Lucy” is a rather mediocre film by a famous director and screenwriter, whose name and track record played a cruel joke on him. Luc Besson was guided by Christopher Nolan’s Inception and really wanted Lucy to have a similar effect on the viewer. Alas, not this time.

For “science fiction that will make us think,” there is no at least a developed plot, there is only an interesting idea that is not developed in any way, is demonstrated very sparingly, with a bunch of unnecessary “whistle-jumps”, the timing of which would be better devoted to patching holes in the script.

The director stated that at first the film turned out to be too “documentary and philosophical,” so they injected it with action, which here consists of a couple of short shootouts and children waving their hands in the air. The latter is especially offensive, remembering the fighting skills of the beauty Lilu.

P.S. When I talked about Edge of Tomorrow, I lamented that modern Hollywood has developed the perfect template for just good films that will make money. Luc Besson clearly showed us that on the other side of the template there does not necessarily have to be a unique and elaborate masterpiece – outright hackwork can easily fit there too.