What if you combined Dune with The Bourne Identity and cast Scarlett Johansson as the kick-ass lead? This could describe the basic pitch for Luc Besson’s 2014 sci-fi action thriller Lucy, a movie that, a decade after its release, feels both infantile and refreshingly bonkers.
It’s hard to remember a time when Johansson wasn’t synonymous with action sci-fi shenanigans, but just two years after The Avengers, Johansson as an action lead in Lucy was something of a risk. Before her involvement with Iron Man 2 in 2010 (the moment when the MCU started to seriously expand), Johansson was best known for her work on beloved indies like Ghost World or Sophia Coppola's Lost in Translation.
Lucy, a sci-fi thriller with a very silly premise, was Scarlett Johansson’s shift into mainstream action. Ten years later, it shouldn’t be as watchable as it is. And yet the strength of Lucy isn’t that it’s so bad, it’s good. Instead, it’s a good movie pretending to be a bad one.
Johansson’s Lucy is an unwilling drug mule. In a bit of contrived writing, she’s forced to have an experimental brain drug sewn into her stomach to unwittingly smuggle it. But putting experimental drugs inside of movie characters tends to unleash those drugs, which is exactly what happens to Lucy. Instead of using only a fraction of her brain power, as the old canard goes, the drug lets her access other parts of her brain, which gives her psychokinetic abilities and powers of prescience. In short, she accidentally becomes Professor X, Jean Grey, and a Bene Gesserit sister at the same time.
Lucy’s ultra-brain powers lead her to the research of Professor Samuel Norman, who Morgan Freeman plays with such Morgan Freemanness that calling him by his character name feels incorrect. Freeman is convinced that if Lucy continues to use more and more of her brain power, she’ll be able to see all of time and space... before she’s overwhelmed and dies.
Longtime science fiction fans are well aware of this trope; a sci-fi drug gives someone superpowers, and they become a self-destructive god. A Bradley Cooper blockbuster, Limitless, had trotted it out just three years earlier. But despite the fact Luc Besson made the 1997 sci-fi epic The Fifth Element, the strength of Lucy is that it seems blissfully unaware of any science fiction it's cribbing from. Like Lucy slowly finding her powers, the movie acts like this is the first time we’ve ever seen a story like this, giving the film the vibe of Black Mirror For Babies.
Yet it's in its naivety that Lucy succeeds. Treating it as serious science fiction makes it seem downright silly. But as a gateway to fun concepts, one aided by excellent action, Lucy has aged well. No one has gotten bored with telekinetic heroines, nor are we sick of thinking about what would happen if brains could bridge all of time and space. The audacity of Lucy was to present all of these concepts as happening by accident. That’s a great way to launch an action epic. Don’t tell us someone is a Chosen One destined for greatness. Just take us along for a random person’s very weird ride.
