Review: Lucy

A poptastic psychedelia with philosophical underpinnings, Luc Besson's Lucy is bonkers to the bone, functioning more as a hopped-up flipbook of visual homages and delights than the semi-coherent actioner it's been marketed to be.

The skeletal plot finds our titular heroine (Scarlett Johansson) in Taipei, coerced by her one-week-old boyfriend Richard (Borgen's Pilou Asbaek) into delivering a suitcase to Mr. Jang (the original Old Boy Choi Min-Sik). The delivery goes awry - Richard's shot dead and Lucy's forced to become a drug mule for Jang, a packet of the volatile chemical CPH4 surgically stuffed into her stomach. When the packet bursts, the drug floods her system, increasing her brainpower and ability to control other people and matter.

Besson has never been one to let facts get in his way - he's admitted the premise that we use 10% of our brains is fiction - and he uses the myth to play with its possibilities. There are inserts of Morgan Freeman, cinema's resident avatar of dignity and divinity, orating on the "gigantic network of information to which we have no access" and the brain cell gauging the hospitability of its host to decide to be a good guest and reproduce or be immortal and kill its host.

Cannibalising everything from National Geographic to Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey to his own back catalogue, Besson is obviously having fun with his comic book-like heroine's expanding powers even as he drives home her impending demise. There's a plangent scene as Lucy calls home, making a last human connection to her mother, as she ruminates on what is happening to her: "I feel everything - the space, the air, the rotation of the earth, my brain, the deepest parts of my memory." The latter includes her time in her mother's womb. It's quite a scene: the child surpassing her creator and being completely aware of it.

Applause to Johansson, who delivers a fully committed performance amidst Besson's clutter. In a sense, Lucy could be seen as the third part of the actress's unintentional trilogy of disembodied aliens - the first her operating system in Her, the second her woman who fell to earth in Under the Skin. All are simultaneously befuddled and beguiled by humanity; Lucy is more extreme in that there's an avalanche of information at fingertips and she's too impatient for ordinary folk to catch up with her. Johansson becomes more and more devoid of emotion and personality as Lucy's cerebral capacity increases, yet she also becomes eminently more watchable.

The film has its set pieces - a nifty car chase through Paris and a showdown with Jang and his squad - but all are mere foreplay for the far-out finale, where time and space bend to irrelevancy. Frankly, it's nuts. All credit to Besson, it sometimes borders on the sublime.

Lucy

Directed by: Luc Besson

Written by: Luc Besson

Starring: Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman, Choi Min-Sik, Julian Rhind-Tutt, Amr Waked, Analeigh Tipton, Pilou Asbaek