Movie Review: Lucy

Rated R.  90 minutes.

Quick summary: A young woman becomes a drug mule unwillingly and ends up becoming highly intelligent from being able to use 100% of her brain due to a twist of events.

My reaction in a nutshell: Holy shit it was intense and a bit scary, but it was worth it. No you will not get nightmares even if you are faint hearted. It just gets you thinking a bit.
In general, if a film has Morgan Freeman in it, it can't be bad. Scarlett Johansson played her role, Lucy, really well. Lucy is a young woman with a partying lifestyle and ends up being tricked by Richard, some guy she met at a party, to deliver a case of "papers". More like she was partially forced and threatened. Little did she know that this briefcase contains the newest drug called CPH4. She gets the package sewn into her stomach and the contents leak when she was kicked by her captor in the stomach. From then on, Lucy's character begins to change. Like the nature shots the movie used to juxtapose with the events of the story, they showed Lucy being taken away by the crime syndicate alongside cheetahs hunting antelope. Going even further, the shot of a mouse sniffing around a mousetrap was already alluding to Richard's shady deal. As the story goes on, Lucy starts gaining more usage of her brain while her humanity begins to diminish. She becomes colder and colder void of desire or compassion. Essentially it's one of the film's theme, in exchange for this supposed higher intelligence, does humanity deserve or should be obtain such a thing. Or as Morgan Freeman's character, Samuel Norman, says "I don't know if we are ready for it." Lucy probably already knew what was going to happen when she made that farewell phone call to her mother. I also need to mention that it has a great soundtrack.


The ending of the movie is not necessarily a happy or a sad one. It leaves us more with a question of what should we do with infinite knowledge. Even for a very violent film, the action towards the end became more predictable because you know as Lucy gains more power no one is able to stop her. One of my criticisms is the use and lack of subtitles. Choi Min-sik plays Mr. Jang, a Korean drug lord/mafia head, and his followers are also played by Korean actors. The movie begins in Taipei, Taiwan and Jang is in a hotel there conducting his "business". The hotel staff obviously would speak Mandarin Chinese, but as they shift to the Korean characters, there were no subtitles to translate what they were saying. One can argue that their dialogue is not the most important in the movie, but my friend next to me translated the Korean for me and it gave another dimension into it. It is only later in the film that Korean was translated. I think many non-Asians unfamiliar with the culture watching the film won't be able to differentiate Korean and Chinese. As it was not made clear in the beginning, many people might assume that Jang is a Taiwanese triad simply because the words Taipei and Taiwan was uttered in the film. The captors in the story were a mixture of Korean and Chinese characters and actors. Even though this is just a sci-fi thriller and it's simply a work of fiction, it gives Asians overall a bad rap due to the minority appearances in Hollywood film. I doubt that that one Taiwanese surgeon that helped Lucy remove the package of drugs in the film can make up for it. I remembered distantly in the newer version of Green Hornet starring Seth Rogan and Jay Chou, they also made use of the Korean mafia.

It more thriller and less thought provoking though Lucy tries to be thought provoking. I would say the film is a response to our human desire of becoming "the ultimate being". The lectures performed by Morgan Freeman were very helpful in guiding the viewer through the story in case you did terrible in your biology and evolution class. There's some black humor sprinkled in some places and the special effects and CG are a joy to watch.