Luc Besson rarely lets the viewer down, a French director,
producer and writer who is best known for thrillers and action films like Nikita
(1990) through Leon
(1994) to Adele
Blanc-Sec (2010) and the badly received The
Family (2013) - which I thoroughly enjoyed. His latest directorial outing, of which he
also wrote the screenplay and produced, is Lucy (2014) a movie that is in a
class of its very own and defines what entertainment should really be about.
But if Besson ‘is the man’ then Scarlett Johansson ‘is the woman’, how I love a
women with a gun!
Johansson is Lucy a young American living in Taipei, Taiwan
who is conned by her boyfriend Richard (Danish actor Pilou Asbaek whom you may
have seen in A
Hijacking 2012) into delivering a briefcase to Mr Jang (Choi Min-sik, the
star of two classic S Korean movies 2005’s Lady
Vengeance and 2003’s Old Boy) who
turns out to be a notorious South Korean gangster. He kidnaps Lucy and forces
her, and three other men, to become drug mules, operating on them and inserting
bags of CPH4 into their stomachs. While waiting her turn to deliver the drugs
she gets beaten, kicked in the stomach, which in turn releases the drug into
her system with very dire circumstances. The drug is a synthetic version of the
chemical that stimulates brain growth in foetuses, but in the large dose that
Lucy imbibes in to her body it can escalate the use of the human brain from the
10% we generally use to a level unknown to Professor Samuel Norman (Morgan
Freeman) who specialises in brainpower. Our heroine gradually develops
psychokinetic abilities that according to Mr Besson result in supernatural
powers. With the help of Pierre Del Rio (Amr Waked - Winter
of Discontent 2012) of the French police force Lucy set’s out to track
down the remaining drug mules with Mr Jang and his gangsters in hot pursuit.
Another visually
rich film, head and shoulders above many other action thrillers, a film without
a single dull moment, of course it’s a exaggerated load of hocus pocus but to
get the best from this exciting film just ignore the nonsensical plot, sit back
and enjoy 90 minutes of complete escapism – and Scarlett Johansson!
No comments:
Post a Comment