Combine the words “drug users” and “films” and one imagines a blur of downers and unpleasantries: grotty apartments, wan-looking addicts with beanies and scabs, vomit-lined gutters, bullet-ridden men in singlets — that sort of thing.
After decades of cinematic sermonising the message from Hollywood (and just about any film industry) is simple: that drugs are bad mmmkay, and, like crime, they just don’t pay.
Neil Burger’s 2011 drama Limitless, in which Bradley Cooper plays a skinflint writer who becomes a genius millionaire after taking an experimental new drug, took a different tack. Burger contemplated side effects and the dangers of addiction, but the film was hardly an exercise in finger waving; it was the story of a zero who became an (anti) hero by taking awesome narcotics.
In director Luc Besson’s Lucy, Scarlett Johansson ingests a sophisticated blue substance (Walter White ain’t got nothing on this batch) and becomes so awesome she evolves into something practically omnipotent. Hollywood may be rewiring its message to something more contemporary: that drugs are pretty great if you choose the right ones.
Not that our narcotic-fuelled protagonist had much choice. A strange encounter with her shady Johnny-come-lately boyfriend in Taiwan leads to a briefcase of ultra-expensive drugs handcuffed to her wrist. If that wasn’t unfortunate enough, they are soon stuffed into her belly by Korean gangsters. Mr. Jang (Choi Min-sik, star of Oldboy) and his minions forcefully recruit mules to export their gear to Europe.
A couple of hard kicks to the stomach later, the blue powder (called CPH4) leaks into Lucy’s insides and — instead of dropping dead or searching for a copy of Pink Floyd’s The Wall – she gets smarter and smarter. Intermittent text inserts inform us how much of her brain she is currently using; the premise of the film is kicked along by the furphy that human beings only use 10% of their brains at any given moment.
Enter Morgan Freeman, who somehow manages to give a distinguished presence in a role not far away from the crazy professor who was right all along. His character is an expert in, um, human potential, believing if people could approach 100% of their brain power they could transcend matter and control things using telepathy and energy, like Carrie crossed with Emperor Palpatine plus (given this film is totally in the zeitgeist) a techno-twist – Mr Anderson from the Matrix, say, or the Master Control Program from Tron.
Realising her days as a flesh and blood mortal are numbered, and needing more of the good stuff to keep her going, Lucy spends much of the running time engaged in Besson-like activities such as playing cat-and-mouse with gangsters and zipping around in car chases.
Early on the French writer/director sets the film’s atmospheric scope as a wide and expansive playground with plenty of room to get loopy. When Lucy waits in a hotel foyer for a group of violent thugs, Besson (also editor) intercuts the scene with footage of leopards stalking gazelles. Beyond obvious inferences of danger, glimpses of predators in their natural habitat also affects how the scene is read from the point-of-view of its performers, a sort of blasé demonstration of the Kuleshov Effect.
As Lucy slips further from human form the film becomes less disciplined, more technically ambitious and more preoccupied with intellectual babble. That’s until swirling movements of colour and light and visions of the past a la primitive man and dinosaurs lacquer it with one part primordial ooze, one part Microsoft screensaver. Think Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life packaged as an action movie.
It doesn’t always work, Besson’s everything-and-the-kitchen-sink aesthetic approach suggesting a boredom of his own ludicrous conceits. On the human side of things, it’s hard to imagine anybody infusing the material with more spunk and sexiness than Scarlett Johansson, who, amongst other abilities, can keep one hell of a poker face.
Lucy opens July 31.