Lucy

FINALLY! Finally, Luc Besson made me happy and once again, according to his feminist philosophy, he prepared a film with a female protagonist whose perfection matches the others that Luc managed to include in his films during that time. The only problem Lucy has is the fact that she has supernatural abilities, so it’s hard to compare her with Joan of Arc, Nikita or Mathilda. She has a bit of all of these characters but she remains unique. So I can’t help but feel satisfied about the kind of movies Besson keeps making to this day. I find it funny how a lot of people on this site dislikes his leaps from action scenes to explanatory or completely unrelated ones. I, on the other hand, enjoyed this very much. Besson has always been crazy in a good way. (19.12.2014)

Lucy is the guilty pleasure of the year. Luc Besson once again confirms his directorial and screenwriting qualities. This time he comes up with probably the most ambitious action film he's ever made. It's properly brisk, suspenseful, gritty, unapologetic, visually breathtaking and quite intelligent for an action film, I found all the theories very interesting, Scarlett Johansson and Morgan Freeman are top notch, so thumbs up for me. Here at last I can utter my little used though very favourite phrase, it's fucking ride! Watching it also made me reminisce about my favourite action flick Kiss of the Dragon. 90% (05.10.2014)

How could a movie that tries to feed the audience such outrageous theories attempt to look so serious? And what was Luc Besson smoking when he wrote this? Scarlett Johansson made my eyes happy, but my brain got the medieval treatment. (27.10.2014)

It if was the 90's / Morgan Freeman speaking all the monologues after inhaling helium, I would give it 100%; but in this form, I value it mainly as a very amusing loss of judgment. Not everyone can do it with such commitment and dynamics as Besson (the chase in Paris!). I get the feeling that this is what the movie version of the Ass that pissed would look like. Unfortunately / Thank god that at a time when blockbusters are figuring out how to best employ 10% of your brain, the Frenchman's uncontrolled swelling in the remaining ninety is rather a nice bit of bizarreness. BTW, Choi is sick and Scarlett tries quite playfully to play even the stupidest scenes, such as a drug-filled, sensitive phone call to her mother. I'm not actually mad at Lucy at all, because once in a while you need to flush out your synapses with someone else's madness... [50-70%] (29.07.2014)

Lucy is a magnificent roller-coaster ride through the mind of a mad fantasist in which anything is possible. Besson has always been a wonderful storyteller, but it is time to realise that seriousness, rationality and reality are binding for any bard. For Besson, the turning point came with The Fifth Element, where he cast off the shackles and turned toward stories to which boundaries do not apply. Even though he has seemingly come back down to Earth in the past twenty years, he has always adhered to that liberating realisation that as long as the result is coherent in its logic, it is not necessary to limit oneself with rationality. Projects such as Taken are not momentary awakenings from the fever dream, but merely proof that he is able to tell “believable” tales when he is so inclined. But for the most part, he simply doesn’t want to do that, and it’s up to every viewer whether or not they will accept the game of an “unreliable” narrator (in world cinema, Tsui Hark is the only one with whom we can compare Besson). To wonder over Lucy’s absurd sci-fi new-age premise is like watching a roller coaster instead of strapping yourself into a seat and enjoying the ride. The fact that Besson doesn’t set aside this phantasmagoria for even a moment, but instead presents his narrative with a straight face and takes it to its internally logical conclusion is not a sign of madness, but of storytelling brilliance. It is necessary to add that the storyteller’s straight face does not in any way mean that he is telling a serious story. On the contrary, Lucy stands right at the edge of absorbing entertainment and camp, but never slides into it, and therein lies its distinctiveness. Besson never peeked at viewers, but only gazed at them with open eyes, in which it was so easy and delightful to drown. In the context of his work, Lucy is something like The Fifth Element 2.0, though it differs from the first version by inverting the initial elements and adjusting the narrative devices. Instead of the fate of all life, what is at stake here is the existence of a single being, which, however, is the universe itself. Instead of Willis’s cynical hero, behind which stumbles the personification of good, here we have a formulaic cop in the position of an appendage of the universe. And whereas part of the fun of The Fifth Element was built on breaking up space by using editing to turn the monologues of distant characters into dialogues, Lucy entertains by putting the power over space, time, people and matter, which was previously possessed only by filmmakers, in the hands of its heroine, as well as by interconnecting the plot with external narrative elements and hypertextual references. (21.05.2015)