lucy movie review quora

Stay up to date with notifications from The Independent

Notifications can be managed in browser preferences.

UK Edition Change

• UK Politics
• News Videos
• Paris 2024 Olympics
• Rugby Union
• Sport Videos
• John Rentoul
• Mary Dejevsky
• Andrew Grice
• Sean O’Grady
• Photography
• Theatre & Dance
• Culture Videos
• Food & Drink
• Health & Families
• Royal Family
• Electric Vehicles
• Car Insurance deals
• Lifestyle Videos
• UK Hotel Reviews
• News & Advice
• Simon Calder
• Australia & New Zealand
• South America
• C. America & Caribbean
• Middle East
• Politics Explained
• News Analysis
• Today’s Edition
• Home & Garden
• Broadband deals
• Fashion & Beauty
• Travel & Outdoors
• Sports & Fitness
• Sustainable Living
• Climate Videos
• Solar Panels
• Behind The Headlines
• On The Ground
• Decomplicated
• You Ask The Questions
• Binge Watch
• Travel Smart
• Watch on your TV
• Crosswords & Puzzles
• Most Commented
• Newsletters
• Ask Me Anything
• Virtual Events
• Betting Sites
• Online Casinos
• Wine Offers

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in Please refresh your browser to be logged in

Lucy, film review: Scarlett Johansson will blow your mind in Luc Besson's complex thriller

(15) luc besson, 90 mins starring: scarlett johansson, morgan freeman, article bookmarked.

Find your bookmarks in your Independent Premium section, under my profile

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse Loughrey

Get our the life cinematic email for free, thanks for signing up to the the life cinematic email.

A decade ago, Luc Besson seemed burned out as a film-maker. There was talk of his retirement. The director of Nikita and Léon was reduced to making animated features (the wretched Arthur and the Invisibles) and to overseeing the growth of his company EuropaCorp, a French version of a Hollywood studio that combines sales and distribution with production.

It would be overstating it to suggest that Besson is enjoying a major creative renaissance but Lucy is the best film he has made in a very long time. This is a movie that perfectly illustrates what makes him such a distinctive and infuriating director. Besson combines bravura imagery and ingenious ideas with large dollops of Gallic kitsch and silliness. His attempts at profundity are continually undermined by an infantile desire to throw in slapstick and action sequences for their own sake. What can't be denied is the brilliance of the execution. Lucy, partly shot in Imax, deserves to be seen on the biggest screen possible.

Helped by the cinematographer Thierry Arbogast and by the virtuosity of the special effects technicians at Industrial Light and Magic, the veteran French director has delivered a film that really does induce the same sense of wonder that was found in the silent era in Georges Méliès' fantastical shorts.

The key concept here – promoted relentlessly in the marketing that always accompanies Besson films – is that average humans only use 10 per cent of their brain capacity. In order to demonstrate how somebody would function using the full might of their noggin, Besson devises an incredibly convoluted and complex thriller plot. Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) is an American student living a riotous life in Taipei. Her ex-boyfriend persuades her to deliver a mysterious package to a businessman in an upmarket hotel. This package contains a synthetic drug called CPH4 that has mind-bending and enlarging properties. The businessman, really a gangster, forces Lucy and some other unfortunate Europeans to act as drug mules. She has a pouch of the stuff inserted in her guts. When this pouch bursts, she suddenly develops superhuman mental powers.

Having played an alien in Under the Skin and voiced a computer operating system in Her, Johansson is developing a reputation as an utterly fearless actress. She is ready to take roles that more timid Hollywood stars would recoil from instinctively. Lucy allows her to combine two sides of her screen persona: the oddball visionary and the action heroine familiar from Avengers Assemble. Johansson always keeps her poise. She also has an ironic detachment, as if she is at a slight remove from her character. Whether she is instructing a doctor how to remove drugs from her abdomen or using her telepathic powers to make her gun-toting gangster adversaries stick to the ceiling, she is strictly matter of fact in her manner. She helps anchor a film that might otherwise have seemed preposterous.

There are scenes in Lucy which are strangely moving, in which Besson briefly moves away from his kinetic, comic book-style storytelling. We hear the heroine reminiscing about moments in her earliest childhood that she could not possibly remember without the CPH4. As her powers increase, so does the inevitability of her demise – or, at least, that of her body. She can perceive things that she would rather ignore, ranging from her mortality to the potential health problems that her flatmate faces unless she changes her lifestyle.

Between the action scenes, there are also time-outs for philosophising about the nature of time, matter and perception. Lucy's sounding board is Professor Samuel Norman (Morgan Freeman), an academic whose area of research is precisely the untapped possibilities of the human mind. Freeman plays the role in just the way you would expect – with a solemn and dignified gravitas.

Lucy: Film stills

Besson borrows ideas and motifs from countless other films, including some of his own. The scene in which Lucy pinions a gangster boss to his chair by sticking blades through his hands owes an obvious debt to the extreme Asian thrillers made by Takashi Miike or Park Chan-wook. The more lyrical, metaphysical moments can't help but invoke memories of Terrence Malick movies such as The Tree of Life. Then, there are the outrageously silly sequences – most notably, a car chase through Paris in which Lucy drives like a maniac – that are in the spirit of Besson's own earlier films.

There is a sense that the screenplay is a puzzle that Besson himself has only partly worked out. He hasn't managed to introduce any meaningful romantic sub-plot. It is clear that the hard-bitten Paris cop chief (played by Egyptian actor Amr Waked) is besotted with Lucy. However, she is so far ahead of him intellectually, and he is so busy keeping Korean gangsters at bay, that there is no time for them to make anything other than the most cursory small talk.

Watch Apple TV+ free for 7 days

New subscribers only. £8.99/mo. after free trial. Plan auto-renews until cancelled

Lucy may not make sense but it is refreshing to see Besson working at full throttle. The film has an energy and visual inventiveness that was almost entirely lacking in his last feature as a director, The Family, a lazy comedy-thriller in which an ageing mob boss (played by Robert De Niro) hides out in provincial France.

A French director tilting at an international audience, Besson himself often appears to be caught between different cultures and film-making styles. That confusion is reflected in Lucy but is part of the film's richness. From his thriller Nikita (1990) early in his career to The Lady (2011), his biopic of Burmese political leader Aung San Suu Kyi, Besson has often made films about strong and defiant female characters. Lucy may be confused and eccentric but it is stylish, provocative film-making. As an action movie with ideas, it is also a welcome antidote to the mindless, testosterone-driven fare – such as The Expendables – that has been clogging up screens this summer.

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Subscribe to Independent Premium to bookmark this article

Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Premium subscription today.

New to The Independent?

Or if you would prefer:

Want an ad-free experience?

Hi {{indy.fullName}}

• My Independent Premium
• Account details
• Help centre

Lucy: An Underrated Summer Blockbuster Overflowing With Brains & Complexity

Lucy is one of the more intriguing, psychedelic blockbusters of the 21st century. Riding the coattails of 2011’s Limitless (the Bradley Cooper vehicle about a man who stumbles upon a pill that allows him to use 100% of his brain capacity), Lucy explores the hypothetical fantasy of an individual actualizing untapped cognitive superpowers. Helmed by Luc Bresson, the film blends gangster/shoot-’em-up genre signifiers with sci-fi semiotics to achieve a unique effect: visualizing humanity’s synaptic fabric at its utmost potentiality, both theoretically and fictively.

The focal point of the film is Lucy (Scarlet Johansson), who is taken captive and coerced to serve as the drug mule for CPH4: a rare, mind-enhancing, and extremely valuable synthetic drug. After being surgically implanted with CPH4 (supposedly derived from the chemical produced during natal gestation period), the chemical packaging accidentally breaks, leaking into her bloodstream. Steadily secreted with high amounts of CPH4, Lucy soon begins to tap into incredibly dynamic sublayers of her cognitive topography, acquiring the powers of telekinesis and telepathy. There’s a kick, of course—her boosted mental dexterity comes at the cost of accelerating her metabolic/cellular putrescence.

It’s a classic, Faustian situation: a trade-off between virtuosity and longevity, cellular prowess and near-instantaneous senescence. Intoxicated by her new power, Lucy naturally evolves to perceive the world through newfound eyes. She finds herself preoccupied with immortality instead of balance or reproduction—after all, she’s leapt beyond the averageness of our basic, parabolic metabolism and catapulted into a vertically ascendant neural trajectory. Her ontology quickly becomes supersonic, even astral perhaps—Lucy is reborn into a psychonaut hellbent on transcendent self-realization.

Thins quickly become quite recondite. Luckily, we have Professor Norman (Morgan Freeman)  providing us with large doses of supplemental exposition— guiding the audience along by feeding the plot’s logic as any scientist role in a ’90s disaster movie might . Early on, Norman details Lucy’s neurological development stage by stage—spoon-feeding digestible summaries of each incremental increase of Lucy’s brain functioning, sensory awareness, and cellular profundity. He posits, in Darwinian-deduced logic, that all species tend to seek ways of reproduction once a minimum degree of security is achieved . In Lucy’s case, this scenario becomes true in novel, neurological fashion. Instead of holding the conventional maternal inclination to procreate via the womb, Lucy finds herself obsessed with propagating her genetic composition via consciousness. Confronted with both cellular instability and impending mortality, her genetic proclivity is to externalize her mind—to reproduce her neural-DNA via the pursuit of immortality.

Johansson is perfectly fit to play this conflicted role: simultaneously cerebral and maternal , intellectual and sensual , fierce and gentle , she naturally personifies the central tensions and dichotomies at play. Her personal growth as Lucy is never less than fascinating on a evolutionary plane. Despite being a victim, she quickly adopts her new neurochemical disposition—proving that our preoccupations are possible more determined by hormonal/psychological calibrations than we may believe. In other words, Lucy is a prime example of that belief that are ideological leanings are flimsily encoded, and deeply contextual. Before long, she repudiates her more mediocre humanly preoccupations, finding herself ever more obsessed with her Neophyte trajectory. Intoxicated by power and possibility, she seemingly accepts the quest to become a pan-conscious , neuroplastic Übermensch .

In one of the film’s most daring and spellbinding sequences, Lucy recalls memories and sensations deeply embedded within her body. Suddenly, she can summon experiences dating back to the womb—remembering the taste of her mother’s breast milk, the sounds and pains of her young tendons and joints growing as a child, and so on. Cosmically attuned, Lucy is beginning to exceed her previous entrapment to immediate experiences. Moreover, her retrospective versatility goes way beyond basic nostalgia of remembrance. She viscerally reincarnates the past: merging the boundaries of ideas and flesh. She has fully transitioned into the inchoate stages of a new psychic dimension—unfettered from the routine thresholds of ordinary human immanence.

At this juncture in Lucy’s mutation, emotions (fear, sadness, love) begin to dissipate, or blur, into purely temporal elements. Affect, in both the film’s narrative and visual language, becomes increasingly kinetic—sheer velocity. As Lucy speeds toward new hyperactive planes on the cognitive continuum, she begins to bend, warp, and control the increasingly malleable frequencies of her universe. As manifested by Luc Bresson in breathtaking sequences, we witness Lucy traversing a metropolitan cityscape that is dynamically alive. The urban space is teeming and proliferating with information/data. It has become a synesthetic, multivalent frontier—apparently, her consciousness is now capable of rearranging the fundamental molecularity of things simply by tapping into her neural nexus/circuitry.

Miraculously transformed into a veritable superhuman, Lucy becomes philosophically, evolutionarily, and cinematically synchronized. Like Spider-Man after the iconic spider bite , Lucy is reborn within her old skin—privately transformed into a fully-embodied mutant. However, unlike most lazily-defined superheroes, Lucy’s regeneration is primarily psychic—exponentially more metaphysical than sacrificial, heroic, or strength-based. She’s not fixated on saving citizens from runaway subway trains or safeguarding silly infinity stones . Sure, there’s a side plot with a squadron of drug smuggling thugs interwoven into the plot (so as to satisfy studio execs and offer a little summer blockbuster panache), but at its heart, Lucy is mostly concerned with pursuing neuroscientific questions.

To approximate the titular character’s genius and quantum entangling, Bresson propels the film’s visual language to a level of dazzling, kaleidoscopic celerity. Through Lucy’s eyes, we recurrently witness neon lines and dazzling fields of CGI-infused signals appear in public spheres like transubstantiated waves of string theory. At the sight of these extraordinary interfaces, we begin to intuit that Lucy’s intelligence is slowly segueing into a vessel of pure energy — barreling toward a climactic eschatology of cellular permeability & intellectual multiplicity. Lucy is becoming a techno-utopian fantasy—a holistic, globalized, porous network of disseminated ideation.

At the same time,  Lucy is not solely interested in the boundary limits of consciousness—it’s also keen about deconstructing the ethical interstices between radical mutation and normative averageness. The notion of a super-human is organically loaded with connotations of egoism, perilous responsibility, lethal momentum. Similarly, the moral issues that arise are more complex than simple pride/humility dualities. As Lucy gains the neural capacity to surpass the stultifying limitations of the routine mind (logic, emotion, morality), she finds herself prone to new quandaries—namely, the declining health & sense of identity/autonomy that naturally results from her hyperactive hormonal and cognitive reprogramming.

Lucy’s superabundant perspectival bandwidth is biologically and even psychologically self-defeating—overwhelmed with power, she organically becomes resolute upon fulfilling the prophecy of attaining psychic inter-dimensionality at the consequence of sentient nullity. Accordingly, the film wisely ruminates on the mortal and corporeal repercussions of sublimating oneself into a ethereal super-mind, implicitly posing countless philosophical inquiries:

• Will Lucy retain any agency once she’s fully externalized and enveloped into the cosmic/digital plenum?
• How does the body reconcile self-hood with boundlessness?
• Does the mind have the inherent power to make the universe unstable and changeable at a molecular level?
• What are the true confines of physics, time, history, and identity?

Warily, Lucy begins to grasp that she’s dying at a supersonic speed, and that soon, she’ll be unable to sustain her former sense of self. She is effectively reincarnating into a super-computer. And thus, the film sequentially shows her undergoing a very bizarre existential maturation process that entails:

1. Undoing time organically (her flesh dissolving with the increasing elasticity of her consciousness)

2. Encapsulating eternity (as the entire spectrum of history incrementally becomes splayed within her central cerebral cortex)

Bresson evokes these abstract movements through the final shots of Lucy sitting at a computer chair while simultaneously floating backwards, epoch by epoch, to all sorts of timelines, including a prehistoric earth occupied by dinosaurs and a prelapsarian age where simians ruled. This reverse movement creates a sort of post-Babylonian, reverse-Darwinian fable—a story about a singular consciousness unifying all knowledge in an all-engulfing, omniscient, encyclopedic, syncretic endgame. The historical montage seems to suggest that cosmic harmony and homogeneity substantiates at the separation of the mind from the body—attained by the sacrifice of one’s entire being into an infinite, semiotic system of past, future, & present information.

At bottom,  Lucy seems to ask a common techno-existential inquiry: What might happen if our ontology somehow learned to transfer or synthesize itself entirely into a vast, cosmic web? It then pushes this question even further: what if the web became untethered from its configured nodal network? In other words, what if being and meaning (currently ricocheting within a contained continuum of between satellites/signals/psyches/electronic) entered into a free-floating phase?

Like Transcendence , another woefully underrated sci-fi film with big ideas ,  Lucy investigates this existential pickle by challenging the relationships between information, identity, and memory. It ponders infinity in the form of neural circuitries—seeing timelessness as the reunification of fleshly synapses into pure frequency. It imagines the human species recoding/drugging itself to form a cyborgian entity—effectively becoming an invincible nonbinary mass of frequencies that transcends well beyond our language, our conceptual framework, and our human physiology.

Recently, the pop physicist Michio Kaku has broached a similar inquiry—discussing the potential for downloading the brain to a laser beam and sending it to space . Closely resembling this conceptual possibility, Lucy wonders if it is possible for information/cognition to persist past the annihilation of our species, and perhaps even earth itself—if consciousness could be transmitted into galactic orbit, and left to endure until the final retraction/endpoint of the universe. As riveting as these questions sound, Lucy , like  Transcendence  and   Kaku’s theories, leave numerous unanswered threads. Specifically, one cannot help but to wonder about what the ontological meaning/significance of broadcasting consciousness on a laser beam/digital interface might be—especially if this information persists ad infinitum, long after the species and meaning system that initiated and produced it perishes.

This dilemma recalls the infamous philosophical conundrum of the tree falling with no one around to hear it. Or to make another simplistic analogy, it begs the question of a video game in a world where its compatible console has become obsolete and extinct. What is information without the cognitive systems that create and receive it? Are silicon-made data and radio emissions living things upon themselves? Luckily, Lucy herself directly touches upon this quandary when she ponders:

 Time gives legitimacy to its existence. Time is the only true unit of measure. It gives proof to the existence of matter. Without time, we don’t exist.

Here, the film offers a tangible philosophical recourse/avenue to explore: Time.

It should be noted that by this point Lucy is also now discussing a concept of time that goes beyond our anthropocentric notion of time, per say. More acutely, it’s looking at Time that both precedes and perseveres long past works of art. It is concerned with time beyond the value-limits of language: beyond semiotic finitude. Such a notion of time pushes the question of information’s ontology into a space of nebulous ambiguity. Do objects and data exist outside our conscious plenum? Would everything turn moot if the universe became bereft of subjectivity?

The truth of the matter here remains murky, at best. For one, Lucy’s claim above is tenuous and tautological. It satisfies itself with syllogistic circularity, essentially claiming:

• Time is meaning
• Time is omnipresent
• Therefore, everything in time always will be meaningful

And in making this move, the film seems to sideline the more interesting dilemma about the role of human subjectivity in this question. Sure, one can posit that there is eternal value to information and things—even within an unthinking vacuum. But what if there intrinsically isn’t? What then could we make of human data/psychic information that had been downloaded and sent into hyperspace on an intergalactic laser beam? Would meaning be retained in the lingering possibility that these signals might be eventually intercepted? Does the mere potential of this vestigial potentiality grant it a sense of purpose? After all, a new consciousness could emerge to decode/decipher it, and thus, one could argue this hypothetical alone infuses the liminal meaninglessness with meaning ( even during its vacuous interim period). But then to whom is this residual and potential significance worth anything?

Whatever theory one sides with, the problem remains the same—namely, that these existential inquiries remain oddly absent for recent narratives about informational transcendence. For many, this predicament, if unveiled explicitly, would make the whole project of encoding/downloading conscious onto external devices seem utterly frivolous and futile. For others, all of these ideas are simply much too abstract and farfetched and erudite. I’d counter this negativity, however, by claiming that such sci-fi speculations are nonetheless novelties that offer many insightful delights.

Cinematic delicacies such as  Lucy ,  Transcendence , and  The Matrix let us contemplate the intangible, metaphysical effects of our ever-digitizing ecosystem in ways science, math, and physics are still incapable of. It’s easy to write off speculative fiction as undisciplined pseudo-science. It’s harder to recognize the ways in which it probes the underlying purpose of scientific agendas and our intellectual/evolutionary progress. Stories have the power to show us the interwoven and entangled dynamics between thought and being, between quantum reality and fleshly mortality. Stories can reimagine, challenge, and tinker with tenuously corroborated theories, thereby forming new niches and liminal spaces simply by the power of experimenting with nascent ideas.

Just take the highly ludic scene where Lucy breaks down the physics of mutability. In her first display of telekinetic prowess, Lucy transmutes her hand into webbed fingers before restoring her digits back to normal form. In her second display, she transmutes a pen into ovoid, elliptical, and atomized shapes. While enchanting the Professor and his cronies with this visual sleight-of-hand, Lucy extrapolates upon her budding capacity to rearrange cells, which as she points about, function as the atomistic bedrock of all existence:

Electrical impulses. Every cell knows and talks to every other cell. They exchange a thousand bits of information between them per second. Cells group together, forming a giant web of communication which in turn forms matter. Cells get together, take on one form. Deform. Reform. It makes no difference, it’s all the same. Humans consider themselves unique, so they rooted their whole theory of existence on their uniqueness. ‘One’ is their unit of measure, but it’s not. All social systems we put into place are a mere sketch. One plus one equals two, that’s all we’ve learned. But one plus one has never equaled two. They are in fact no numbers and no letters. We’ve codified our existence to bring it down to human size to make it comprehensible. We’ve created a scale so that we can forget its unfathomable scale.

Here, the film, through Lucy’s speech, gives us yet another possible answer to the preceding inquiries about meaning in a meaningless universe. It presents matter itself as an eternal actualization of consciousness. It offers a very materialistic take on the conditions of temporal ontology—marrying idealism and materialism together by claiming there is always an essential ontology and temporal dimension in cellular processes.

This logic, if true, effectively renders any concerns about meaning’s reliance on subjectivity moot and ridiculous—given that it perceives the networked exchange of information to be the bedrock of all molecular things, conscious or not. Lucy comes to see cellular activity as a ubiquitous entity—eternally proffering matter some degree of meaningfulness (even if our version of consciousness is detuned to it).

This is an interesting proposition that gives legitimate credence to the conjectural notion of a post-corporeal consciousness. In Lucy’s pan-conscious view of things, rocks have consciousness, pens have consciousness, and hands do to. And although I have some minor philosophical misgivings about this presumption that cellular information precedes matter or invokes it into being (I’d like to think matter and meaning are intertwined in a mutually codependent chiasmus), I appreciate the suggestion that meaning is far from being contingent upon humanity—sourced instead from the cascading impulses of cosmic energy.

Whatever one takes away philosophically, Lucy remains one of the more fascinating mutant figures to be put to screen in recent memory. Sure, she’s sculpted heavy-handedly through exposition-laden, even didactic monologues, but that doesn’t diminish the complexity of her characterization. I found myself exponentially more drawn to Lucy’s arc than I’ve even been to any  X-Men  mutant (and I grew up avidly collecting every comic card in the Danger Room ).  Lucy represents one of cinema’s loftiest projects—using fiction to embody and flesh out extremely convoluted and heady ideas.

Mirroring its titular character’s conjectures regarding cellular communication and transfusion, the film itself becomes a magically-enhanced, cross-pollinated medium—using CGI technology to manifest a vast web of messy albeit mind-bending interconnectedness. It forms, deforms, and then reforms itself in montage sequences that feel straight out of Koyaanisqatsi ( or any one of Godfrey Reggio’s sprawling cinematic collages ): transubstantiating its musings on mankind’s existential predicament and limitations into a stream of interrelated motion images.

In that aforementioned final sequence of the film, Lucy leans back in a computer chair and views the variable speeds of the planetary reticulum progressing through history. Cliché as it may be, Bresson uses Times Square as the setting: we witness the slow horse trolleys of the industrial age subtly morph into the rapid transit of the modern life. We also see cellular blobs fusing in primordial, amniotic images of mitosis. We see obsidian tree roots overtaking her body. The cumulative images seem to suggest that time and technology and psychological complexity are intertwined and pervading Lucy’s sensorium. Fusing with her DNA, the encyclopedic entirety of existence (both biological and digital) is transubstantiating her into a post-cyborg: A superhuman.

Bresson uses this montage as the launch pad for imagining a new evolutionary stage. It is  appropriate that Lucy has entered a catatonic state. She is no longer content being a mere director or actor within everyday reality: casually reimagining, compartmentalizing, and sequencing information into narrative forms has become child’s play. Evolving beyond the state where totemic permutations matter, Lucy now exists beyond the confines of action and cinema. As her body dissolves into non-being (emblemized by a black epidermal coating), she fittingly sits motionless in her seat. Movement on a physical level is no longer necessary. She is, after all, becoming a posthuman entity without any need for flesh. She will soon no longer be enmeshed with her environment via bodily interactions.

The film boldly ends at the ultimate dissolution of Lucy’s material form—our protagonist climactically and symbolically vaporized. Lucy’s suspended state signals many things: the death of her humanity, the dissolution of the narrative, and the sudden absurdity of the entire mythological superstructure. With this daring finale, Lucy even renders itself, as a film, vacuous and passé. Its central conduit (Lucy, the character) has ventured past the boundaries of limited artistic/expressive topography—beyond the terrain of moviemaking. Her soma has become a relic, a semiotic ghost. Staring at her empty computer chair, we stare at nothing: our cynosure now unmoored and adrift within some nebulous, un-cinematic, celestial space.

Written by Paul Keelan

Paul Keelan currently resides in Phoenix, AZ with his wife and cat. He has toured the continental US multiple times as a bassist playing rock jams, lived / traveled / taught abroad for over five years (primarily in Asia), and watched an unhealthy amount of movies.

When not writing about cinema for 25YL and Letterboxd, or working on his travel novels / novellas, he spends free time reenacting imaginary montage sequences as he records, edits, and cohosts the spectacular sports movie podcast Cinematic Underdogs.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Film Obsessive welcomes your comments. All submissions are moderated. Replies including personal attacks, spam, and other offensive remarks will not be published. Email addresses will not be visible on published comments.

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

The Cinephile Hissy Fit Looks Deeper Into the Career of Steven Spielberg

Can You Handle Vinegar Syndrome’s Shriek of the Mutilated Release?

Add to Collection

Public collection title

Private collection title

No Collections

Here you'll find all collections you've created before.

clock This article was published more than  9 years ago

‘Lucy’ movie review: Scarlett Johansson’s powerful mind, unlocked and ready to kill

An earlier version of this review incorrectly identified a character as a Tokyo crime boss. The character of Mr. Jang, played by South Korean actor Choi Min-Sik, operates out of Taipei, Taiwan. This version has been corrected.

The theme of " Lucy " may be the potential of the human mind, but the less time any human spends thinking about its largely nonsensical plot, the better. The slickly executed bullet-riddler about brainpower can only be enjoyed by cutting off all attempts at logic and rational thought.

Director Luc Besson — the French filmmaker who placed female stars at the center of such action movies as " La Femme Nikita ," " The Professional " and " The Fifth Element " — recruits Scarlett Johansson to serve as his one-woman army here. She plays Lucy, an American in Taipei who gets thrust into the role of drug mule during a nail-biting opening sequence that generates a tension the rest of the film never matches.

After delivering a silver briefcase to a local crime boss and begging for her life, Lucy discovers that the case contains a powdered version of the chemical CPH4, a substance that, with its bright blue hues, calls to mind Walter White’s crystal meth in “Breaking Bad.” Soon after, Lucy and a few other men wind up with bags of CPH4 surgically embedded in their intestines, destined for transport to multiple European countries. But before Lucy arrives at her destination, the substance begins to leak into her bloodstream, activating a rapidly increasing percentage of her brain. This transforms her into an increasingly unstoppable superwoman, for reasons that defy the basic principles of science as well as science fiction.

This is yet another of those movies premised on the "fact" that normal people use only 10 percent of their brain, a supposition that scientists already debunked when the 2011 thriller " Limitless " constructed its narrative around the same premise. Nevertheless, Besson tries to sell the same bill of goods here. He does it, in part, by relying on the most authoritative cinematic tool known to Hollywood: Morgan Freeman.

As Professor Norman, Freeman delivers a lecture to a room of Paris intellectuals in which he explains what men and women could achieve if only they could light up every corner of the cerebellum. Besson cuts between scenes of Freeman discussing that hypothetical and Johansson acting on it, as her mind overloads with memories and information that somehow also turn her into an assassin capable of engaging in hyper-violent versions of Jedi mind tricks.

In those moments, Freeman and Johansson act like a tag team tasked with persuading the audience to believe in the ridiculous; he delivers the verbal, while Johansson — all firing synapses and blazing guns — provides the visual aids. Why, exactly, does the increasing stimulation of underused brain cells turn Johansson into someone who can read other people's thoughts, control telecommunication devices and turn her hair from blonde to jet-black? Look, I don't know, but Morgan Freeman thinks it's possible. The guy who narrates the Science Channel show " Through the Wormhole " must know what he's talking about, right?

As Lucy, Johansson hopscotches between vulnerability and a robotic commitment to execute whatever her sophisticated, internal data processor tells her to do. Her performance is just grounded enough to keep Besson’s occasionally inventive, sometimes silly visual flourishes — including an overreliance on random footage seemingly pulled from nature documentaries — from turning the movie into self-parody.

Besson clearly understands that the film’s central myth endures because people are intrigued by the prospect of activating our whole heads. He runs with that idea full-tilt and at top speed, even if it means turning Lucy into a walking X-ray machine/broadcast network/telekinetic demigod. It’s possible to be swept away by the fun in all that, but only if you’re capable of silencing the messages bubbling through your own gray matter and ignoring the inevitable questions. Like this one: If Johansson’s Lucy has such command of her mental faculties that she is, essentially, the most enlightened being on the planet, shouldn’t she be able to figure out how to get what she wants without causing so much destruction and loss of life?

Not in this cinematic world, where the more you know, the more equipped you are to kill.

Chaney is a freelance writer.

R. At area theaters. Contains strong violence, disturbing images and sexuality. 89 minutes.

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Trouble logging in?

By continuing, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes.

Email not verified

Let's keep in touch.

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

• Upcoming Movies and TV shows
• Trivia & Rotten Tomatoes Podcast
• Media News + More

By clicking "Sign Me Up," you are agreeing to receive occasional emails and communications from Fandango Media (Fandango, Vudu, and Rotten Tomatoes) and consenting to Fandango's Privacy Policy and Terms and Policies . Please allow 10 business days for your account to reflect your preferences.

OK, got it!

Movies / TV

No results found.

• What's the Tomatometer®?
• Login/signup

Movies in theaters

• Opening this week
• Top box office
• Coming soon to theaters
• Certified fresh movies

Movies at home

• Fandango at Home
• Netflix streaming
• Prime Video
• Most popular streaming movies
• What to Watch New

Certified fresh picks

• Challengers Link to Challengers
• Abigail Link to Abigail
• Arcadian Link to Arcadian

New TV Tonight

• The Jinx: Season 2
• Knuckles: Season 1
• The Big Door Prize: Season 2
• THEM: The Scare: Season 2
• Velma: Season 2
• Secrets of the Octopus: Season 1
• Dead Boy Detectives: Season 1
• Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story: Season 1
• We're Here: Season 4

Most Popular TV on RT

• Baby Reindeer: Season 1
• Fallout: Season 1
• Shōgun: Season 1
• The Sympathizer: Season 1
• Ripley: Season 1
• 3 Body Problem: Season 1
• Under the Bridge: Season 1
• Sugar: Season 1
• A Gentleman in Moscow: Season 1
• Best TV Shows
• Most Popular TV
• TV & Streaming News

Certified fresh pick

• Under the Bridge Link to Under the Bridge
• All-Time Lists
• Binge Guide
• Comics on TV
• Five Favorite Films
• Video Interviews
• Weekend Box Office
• Weekly Ketchup
• What to Watch

DC Animated Movies In Order: How to Watch 54 Original and Universe Films

The Best TV Seasons Certified Fresh at 100%

What to Watch: In Theaters and On Streaming

Awards Tour

Watch An Exclusive Pixar Studio Tour, Plus Inside Out 2 Secrets From The Set

Weekend Box Office Results: Civil War Earns Second Victory in a Row

• Trending on RT
• Rebel Moon: Part Two - The Scargiver
• The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
• Play Movie Trivia

Lucy Reviews

Perhaps the intellectual side of the film arrives a little too late after so much action and does not withstand analysis, but it is enough to elevate a genre film born from an enormous What If... [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | May 9, 2023

It's basically a fantasy wrapped in the guise of science and used as an excuse for an action thriller, but what a thriller. This is a kinetic explosion at its best with Johansson striding through it with a sense of drive and assuredness...

Full Review | May 6, 2023

Lucy‘s two strands co-exist, intercut but separate; the pleasure is in ricocheting between two incompatible elements for an entire movie, making those blunt opening juxtapositions surprisingly indicative of what’s to come.

Full Review | Jan 24, 2023

Besson packs a lot of ideas into the brief 89-minute runtime, but he should've spent another 20 minutes on character development.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 5, 2022

Scarlett Johansson rides a kinetic rush of evolutionary sci-fi and brutal action...

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | May 26, 2021

That's right, this is an action film with a higher purpose. It even comes with its own Terrence-Malick-by-way-of-Stanley-Kubrick tribute.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 1, 2021

Delves so far into scientific theories and philosophies that it rapidly becomes incomprehensible and downright existentially nonsensical.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/10 | Dec 4, 2020

The biggest down side for this movie was the huge absence of action sequences.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Nov 20, 2020

An immensely entertaining and satisfying film that thrives on the strength of Besson's visual style and Johansson's intelligent and emotionally honest performance.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4.0 | Sep 15, 2020

While Besson has made a film that looks good and does provide some amount of entertainment, he populated it with a character that sorely lacks a pulse.

Full Review | Original Score: C+ | Jul 20, 2020

There will be those who laud this as the most fun movie of the summer, while others will condemn it as complete and utter nonsense, and somehow they'll both be right.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Jul 7, 2020

It's silly, it's fun.

Full Review | May 26, 2020

It's like it's the prequel to "Her."

Full Review | Original Score: 5.5/10 | Mar 26, 2020

A fast and loose action movie hellbent on getting in your face and staying on your mind by any means necessary.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Feb 28, 2020

The whole endeavor feels like a half-baked idea carelessly patched together.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/5 | Aug 30, 2019

It is confidently dumb, defiantly moronic and a fine way to spend 90 minutes of time before doing something of value.

Full Review | Original Score: C+ | Jul 30, 2019

I know what you're thinking, but this is no Limitless (Bradley Cooper). As the cells multiply and Lucy taps into more and more of her brain, it's new thrills-new skills with each passing hour.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Apr 17, 2019

Apparently believing the film to be an equally eloquent statement on mankind's past, purpose, and future. It isn't, but with about 50 percent less pretension, LUCY could have been a fun guilty pleasure.

Full Review | Original Score: 2 | Apr 5, 2019

This undeniably silly, but raucously entertaining, off-the-wall transhumanist actioner is an absolute riot.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 3, 2019

Lucy is not a game-changing science fiction movie. Still, it represents the return of Luc Besson to his baroque and risky approach to genre filmmaking. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Mar 26, 2019

• Work & Careers
• Life & Arts

Become an FT subscriber

Try unlimited access Only $1 for 4 weeks

Then $75 per month. Complete digital access to quality FT journalism on any device. Cancel anytime during your trial.

• Global news & analysis
• Expert opinion
• Special features
• FirstFT newsletter
• Videos & Podcasts
• Android & iOS app
• FT Edit app
• 10 gift articles per month

Explore more offers.

Standard digital.

• FT Digital Edition

Premium Digital

Print + premium digital, weekend print + standard digital, weekend print + premium digital.

Today's FT newspaper for easy reading on any device. This does not include ft.com or FT App access.

• 10 additional gift articles per month
• Global news & analysis
• Exclusive FT analysis
• Videos & Podcasts
• FT App on Android & iOS
• Everything in Standard Digital
• Premium newsletters
• Weekday Print Edition
• FT Weekend Print delivery
• Everything in Premium Digital

Essential digital access to quality FT journalism on any device. Pay a year upfront and save 20%.

• Everything in Print

Complete digital access to quality FT journalism with expert analysis from industry leaders. Pay a year upfront and save 20%.

Terms & Conditions apply

Explore our full range of subscriptions.

Why the ft.

See why over a million readers pay to read the Financial Times.

International Edition

Review by Brian Eggert July 26, 2014

A film dependent on the myth that we use only 10 percent of our brain, and further driven by the notion of unlocking 100 percent of the brain’s potential, Lucy , by writer-director Luc Besson, taps into the possibilities more than Limitless , another story about the same subject, but succeeds only in delivering an emotionless action-thriller that wants to be smarter than it is. In the 1990s, Besson made some great action yarns with The Professional and The Fifth Element , though in recent years, he’s preferred to grandfather the next generation of action directors like Pierre Morel ( Taken ) and Olivier Megaton ( Colombiana ) by producing and often providing the scripts to profitable shoot-em-ups. With Lucy, he returns to the director’s chair for the kind of story to which he’s most attributed. And rather than blowing audiences away, he’s made a confounding picture that either explores his central idea too much or not enough; either way, it’s an unsatisfying disappointment.

Neither a convincing conflict nor well-developed characters inhabit Besson’s script, about an American tourist of average intelligence who, while in Taiwan, is kidnapped by a crime lord and forced to become a drug mule. Scarlett Johansson’s titular heroine finds herself under the gun of Jang (Choi Min-sik, from the original Oldboy ), an imposing baddie who orders a pouch of an experimental drug called CPH4 sewn into her stomach, and into those of three other unwilling mules. After she’s transported into a shoddy cell, she receives a beating that unseals the pouch and sends the mystery drug coursing through her blood stream, electrifying her synapses in extraordinary shades of blue. As this goes on, Besson cross-cuts to a lecture by Samuel Norman (Morgan Freeman), an academic who speculates that things would get pretty out-there—telepathic control over matter, space, and time—should human beings ever gain control over 100 percent of their brain, which is exactly what happens to Lucy. The playful editing by Julien Rey also cross-cuts to nature scenes, such as a cheetah hunting a gazelle, to create a parallel between humans and animals, and demonstrate how far beyond basic primal human instincts Lucy will become.

The best scenes of Lucy occur early on, when there’s still some fragment of humanity left in Johansson’s performance, and her character is using 20 or 30 percent of her brain’s potential (Besson keeps track with a counter that flashes onscreen periodically). Lucy develops the ability to learn and perceive things we cannot imagine, and this transforms her into an unstoppable adversary for Jang’s band of thugs. These scenes where Lucy can out-fight and telekinetically outmaneuver gangsters remind us of Milla Jovovich running circles around alien goons in The Fifth Element . But before long, Lucy’s mental capacities increase and she quickly becomes aware that emotions are elementary functions and only hold us back from exploring our real potential. Here’s where the film begins to slow and we gradually lose any investment. It’s difficult to have sympathy for an already poorly drawn character who, now omnipotent, has no emotions and can do virtually anything she puts her mind to. It may have been more entertaining to preserve the early stage in Lucy’s development and wait until closer to the climax to unlock her full, emotionless potential.

The comparison to The Fifth Element is apt, as both films involve a supreme being who thwarts bad guys. What made The Fifth Element so engaging is that it wasn’t told from the supreme being’s perspective; rather, from that of her lovelorn protector (Bruce Willis). Besson introduces a similar role in Lucy with a Parisian cop Del Rio (Amr Waked), who serves as Lucy’s sidekick and whose scenes feel abridged. At one point, she kisses him as “a reminder” of her humanity; however, the moment feels like a forced attempt to emotionally invest the audience. At any rate, when Lucy begins reading minds and putting whole rooms of baddies to sleep with the wave of her hand, the cop becomes superfluous, and any attempt by Jang’s crew to stop her is devoid of tension when all it takes is a mere thought to defeat them. Meanwhile, Johansson’s character has more in common with her voiced OS in Her , who achieves transcendence through vast knowledge, while her emotionless performance echoes early scenes in Under the Skin , except without the inevitable dramatic payoff.

In the end, Besson’s script is involved in shoddy science propelled by the myth that we only use 10 percent of our brain. (Using EEGs, magnetoencephalographs, MRIs, and PET scans, neuroscientists have found no such dormant areas waiting to be uncovered. But who’s checking?) The myth was first proposed in a 1936 self-help book and has no basis in scientific fact, but still, the myth persists because, well, that’s what myths do. Nevertheless, Besson isn’t concerned with science and would rather enter the furthest reaches of exploratory metaphysics through imagery likened to The Matrix and The Tree of Life , where Lucy sees the world as endless streams of neurons and instantly taps into the vast reaches of space and time. It’s a fun idea, but Lucy never quite pays off in Besson’s usual popcorn-munching no-brainer terms, nor does he succeed in elevating the material to its highbrow possibilities. Indeed, Besson packs a lot of ideas into the brief 89-minute runtime, but he should’ve spent another 20 minutes on character development. And, to get as arbitrarily mathematical as his film, he’s only making use of about 65 percent of his concept’s potential.

Related Titles

The Definitives

• In Theaters

Recent Reviews

• Boy Kills World 1.5 Stars ☆ ☆
• Patreon Exclusive: Tuesday 4 Stars ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
• Rebel Moon - Part Two: The Scargiver 0.5 Star ☆
• Patreon Exclusive: Sasquatch Sunset 4 Stars ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
• Abigail 3.5 Stars ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
• The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare 3 Stars ☆ ☆ ☆
• Challengers 4 Stars ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
• Civil War 4 Stars ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
• Patreon Exclusive: Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter 4 Stars ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
• LaRoy, Texas 3 Stars ☆ ☆ ☆
• Blackout 3 Stars ☆ ☆ ☆
• Monkey Man 3 Stars ☆ ☆ ☆
• Short Take: Baghead 2 Stars ☆ ☆
• Patreon Exclusive: The Public Eye 2.5 Stars ☆ ☆ ☆
• Wicked Little Letters 3.5 Stars ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Recent Articles

• MSPIFF 2024 – Dispatch 3
• Guest Appearance: KARE 11 - 3 movies you need to see in theaters now
• MSPIFF 2024 - Dispatch 2
• MSPIFF 2024 – Dispatch 1
• MSPIFF 2024
• The Definitives: Ocean's Eleven
• Reader's Choice: Ocean's Twelve
• Reader's Choice: Ocean's Thirteen
• The Definitives: The Abyss
• Guest Appearance: Feature Fanatics Podcast - John Grisham Movies Retrospective

Common Sense Media

Movie & TV reviews for parents

• For Parents
• For Educators
• Our Work and Impact

Or browse by category:

• Get the app
• Movie Reviews
• Best Movie Lists
• Best Movies on Netflix, Disney+, and More

Common Sense Selections for Movies

50 Modern Movies All Kids Should Watch Before They're 12

• Best TV Lists
• Best TV Shows on Netflix, Disney+, and More
• Common Sense Selections for TV
• Video Reviews of TV Shows

Best Kids' Shows on Disney+

Best Kids' TV Shows on Netflix

• Book Reviews
• Best Book Lists
• Common Sense Selections for Books

8 Tips for Getting Kids Hooked on Books

50 Books All Kids Should Read Before They're 12

• Game Reviews
• Best Game Lists

Common Sense Selections for Games

• Video Reviews of Games

Nintendo Switch Games for Family Fun

• Podcast Reviews
• Best Podcast Lists

Common Sense Selections for Podcasts

Parents' Guide to Podcasts

• App Reviews
• Best App Lists

Social Networking for Teens

Gun-Free Action Game Apps

Reviews for AI Apps and Tools

• YouTube Channel Reviews
• YouTube Kids Channels by Topic

Parents' Ultimate Guide to YouTube Kids

YouTube Kids Channels for Gamers

• Preschoolers (2-4)
• Little Kids (5-7)
• Big Kids (8-9)
• Pre-Teens (10-12)
• Teens (13+)
• Screen Time
• Social Media
• Online Safety
• Identity and Community

Explaining the News to Our Kids

• Family Tech Planners
• Digital Skills
• All Articles
• Latino Culture
• Black Voices
• Asian Stories
• Native Narratives
• LGBTQ+ Pride
• Best of Diverse Representation List

Celebrating Black History Month

Movies and TV Shows with Arab Leads

Celebrate Hip-Hop's 50th Anniversary

Common sense media reviewers.

Pulpy, violent sci-fi actioner is entertaining, thoughtful.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Through its sci-fi concept (and in between fights,

Lucy engages in brutal violence with no consequenc

Strong fantasy violence, with lots of blood. Many

A documentary-type flashback shows animals having

"S--t" is used twice. "Ass," "a--hole," and "hell"

A bottle of Evian water is used to clean a charact

Fictitious drugs and drug smuggling are a major pa

Parents need to know that Lucy is a sci-fi/action movie starring Scarlett Johansson. The violence gets fairly graphic, with lots of shoot outs and blood splattering everywhere. The main female character is manhandled, punched, and kicked, and she also kills some bad guys without consequence. The plot concerns…

Positive Messages

Through its sci-fi concept (and in between fights, shoot outs, and chases), the movie makes several interesting, thoughtful pronouncements: that humans are currently more concerned with having than with being, that nothing ever truly dies, that ignorance creates chaos but knowledge does not, and that we as humans have the capability to change things.

Positive Role Models

Lucy engages in brutal violence with no consequences, and no one in real life could emulate her. But she also has a strength and dedication that's inspiring in a female movie hero. And after she solves the immediate problem of her survival, she genuinely wishes to use her powers for good and for the future of mankind.

Violence & Scariness

Strong fantasy violence, with lots of blood. Many characters are shot and killed, with blood splattering all over. Characters' hands and faces are covered in blood. Characters are used as drug mules, and the drugs are sewn up inside their intestines, requiring several bloody surgeries throughout the movie. Many chases and shoot outs with random death and destruction throughout. The main female character is grabbed, manhandled, punched, and kicked in several early scenes. She shoots and kills several bad guys without consequence. A character is stabbed in the hands with knives.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

A documentary-type flashback shows animals having sex, followed by a woman having sex with a man in a car; nothing sensitive is shown, but what they're doing is clear enough. This is followed by images of birth, both animals and humans. The main character is sometimes sexualized through her outfits. In two instances, male characters place their hands down the front of her top. In one scene, Lucy, while fully clothed, spreads her legs apart to seduce a guard, though she quickly defeats him. Lucy kisses a helpful cop.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

"S--t" is used twice. "Ass," "a--hole," and "hell" are also heard.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

A bottle of Evian water is used to clean a character's bloody hands. A Peugeot is driven during a car chase. Samsung products appear a few times.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Fictitious drugs and drug smuggling are a major part of the plot. A crazed junkie snorts the new drug. Viewers see a brief flashback of a character drinking a shot in a bar. She drinks a shot of whisky with the bad guy while preparing to become a drug mule. And she drinks a sip of champagne on an airplane. The bad guy smokes a cigarette.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Lucy is a sci-fi/action movie starring Scarlett Johansson . The violence gets fairly graphic, with lots of shoot outs and blood splattering everywhere. The main female character is manhandled, punched, and kicked, and she also kills some bad guys without consequence. The plot concerns fictitious drugs and using drug mules to smuggle them, which requires some bloody operations to get them in and out of people's bellies. There are some quick documentary-like flashback scenes of sex between animals as well as between humans, and the main character sometimes wears sexy, objectifying outfits. Language isn't frequent but does contain at least two uses of "s--t." Characters sometimes drink alcohol. It's all pretty intense, but the movie is so slick and thoughtful that teens may come away thinking about the ideas more than the iffy content. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

• Parents say (15)
• Kids say (46)

Based on 15 parent reviews

Entertaining and interesting

What's the story.

Lucy ( Scarlett Johansson ) is a pretty normal young woman, living in Taipei and dating a delivery guy for the local mob. But when she gets roped into delivering a suitcase to the boss, Mr. Jang (Choi Min-sik), she unwittingly becomes a mule for a new kind of drug, carrying it in her stomach cavity. When the bag bursts and the drug is released, Lucy discovers untapped portions of her brain beginning to work. She's suddenly able to see and feel everything. As the drug continues to open up her brain, she begins to be able to move matter. She decides to collect the rest of the drug to buy herself some time and then meet with brain expert Professor Norman ( Morgan Freeman ) to decide what to do with her knowledge. But Mr. Jang is on her trail.

Is It Any Good?

Scientists have already pointed out that the idea that humans use only 10 percent of the brain is a myth, but that shouldn't detract from the fun of Luc Besson 's terrific LUCY. It's a movie that manages to be thoughtful and exciting at the same time. Smarter than Transcendence and more exhilarating than Limitless , Lucy showcases Besson's skill and enthusiasm. His wide frame is filled with colorful cityscapes and a dazzling array of information and input. His jokey little documentary flashbacks broaden the scope, and he crafts slick, clear, superior action sequences.

Yet the movie hinges on Johannson's potent, searching performance, constantly recording the information around her. Her process, moving from struggle to awareness, is highly appealing. (When she pauses to phone her mom, her need is fully apparent.) Then, after all the fighting is done, Lucy leaves mankind with a message of hope. It may be a silly, pulpy "B" movie, but it's a good one.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Lucy 's violence . How much was necessary to get across the movie's point? Was it enough? Too much? How did it make you feel?

How does the drug smuggling subplot enhance or detract from the movie as a whole?

What does the main character learn with her enhanced intellect? What lessons can be taken away from this movie?

Is the main character a strong female role model ? Why or why not?

What scientific concepts did you learn from the movie? What further research would you be interested in doing? Do humans really only use 10 percent of their brain?

Movie Details

• In theaters : July 25, 2014
• On DVD or streaming : January 20, 2015
• Cast : Scarlett Johansson , Morgan Freeman , Analeigh Tipton
• Director : Luc Besson
• Inclusion Information : Female actors, Black actors
• Studio : Universal Pictures
• Genre : Action/Adventure
• Run time : 90 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : strong violence, disturbing images, and sexuality
• Last updated : March 2, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

Suggest an Update

Our editors recommend.

Best Action Movies for Kids

Sci-fi movies.

Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.

The Definitive Voice of Entertainment News

Subscribe for full access to The Hollywood Reporter

site categories

‘lucy’: film review.

Scarlett Johansson plays a woman whose freshly unleashed brain gives her superpowers.

By THR Staff

• Share this article on Facebook
• Share this article on Twitter
• Share this article on Flipboard
• Share this article on Email
• Show additional share options
• Share this article on Linkedin
• Share this article on Pinit
• Share this article on Reddit
• Share this article on Tumblr
• Share this article on Whatsapp
• Share this article on Print
• Share this article on Comment

A fantasy about unlocking 100 percent of the brain’s potential that expects viewers to be using just 2 or 3 percent of their own gray matter, Luc Besson ‘s Lucy plays more like a big dumb superhero flick than sci-fi: The powers Scarlett Johansson gains when given full access to her brain quickly outstrip anything one can imagine 3 pounds of skull-bound neurons and synapses being able to do.

Besson’s script offers neither the well-drawn character dynamics nor the clear motivations of a decent comic book origin story, and as it is quickly clear that no baddie has much chance of stopping Lucy, action sequences carry little weight. A top-shelf cast and the (fading) memory of Besson’s action hits will help the picture at the box office, but word of mouth is unlikely to keep it alive long after a strong opening weekend.

Related Stories

Meryl streep, morgan freeman, naomi watts and reese witherspoon set for nicole kidman's afi tribute, 'transformers one': paramount reveals new release date as official trailer launches from space.

Johansson’s character begins as a party girl studying in Taipei whose new boyfriend ( Julian Rhind-Tutt ) is involved in bad stuff. Thanks to him, she winds up being an unwilling drug mule for Jang ( Choi Min-sik , making the most of a role that forces him to speak through interpreters). A big bag of a superdrug called CPH4 is sewn into her guts, awaiting transport to new markets in Europe. But the bag springs a leak when Lucy is roughed up by her captors, entering her system in such quantities (cue fun CG shots of cellular-level transformations) that it activates huge chunks of cranial real estate she’d never been able to access before — like that little-known lobe that lets you turn off gravity when it suits you.

Helpfully, Besson has been cutting between Lucy’s story and an academic lecture in Paris where researcher Samuel Norman ( Morgan Freeman ) has been hypothesizing about the very thing that is happening to her, making remarkably specific predictions about what might happen if humans were able to use more than the 10 percent we currently use (a myth, by the way ) of the magnificent supercomputers in our heads. His ideas, like some of the film’s other early scenes, are illustrated with cutaways to nature footage suggesting the ways in which all of Earth’s creatures are interconnected, governed by the same laws. Think Luc Besson doing The Tree of Life .

The early stages of Lucy’s transformation offer plenty of kicks and even a touching moment or two: After making her badass escape from Jang and his thugs, she struts into the nearest hospital’s operating room, shoots the patient on the table — a glance at the X-rays told her the patient’s brain tumor was inoperable — and has a surgeon pull out the remaining drugs planted inside her. Forgoing anesthesia, she borrows the surgeon’s phone and calls her mother while he cuts her open, describing what’s going on in her head. “Mom, I can feel everything,” she says as the camera almost imperceptibly rocks; sensations and emotions stretching back to her birth are available to her, triggering what proves to be almost the last human-like response she has in the film.

From here on out, Johansson’s performance grows colder and more analytical. Besson doesn’t let her become as persuasively alien as she is in Under the Skin , but he doesn’t want a human, either. Lucy sets out to round up other batches of the drug and get to Paris, where she can let Dr. Norman see his theories in action. Why do this, one wonders, when in a matter of minutes she has already read his thousands of pages of research and surpassed his understanding?

Plenty of films and novels have envisioned what would happen if we gained conscious control over our entire brain. While most would probably make a real neuroscientist cackle uncontrollably, it’s hard to recall one whose ideas were more laughable than this one. We may roll with the film as its heroine learns Taiwanese over the course of a cab ride or sees the electromagnetic spectrum of cellphone calls, swiping through them as if she were reading their conversations on a touchscreen. We may even buy it when she’s able to change her body at will — sure, growing a webbed hand would take some time and fuel, but at least a body’s cells are controlled by its brain. But the film gives not the slightest justification for Lucy’s increasingly godlike abilities, which soon include time travel and levitation. Every now and then, a nugget of real philosophy is dropped into the screenplay, but it’s surrounded by so much blather that even a generous viewer has trouble using it to justify what Lucy experiences.

Even more damning in an action film, Besson doles out powers in a way that nullifies much of the drama to come. Once we’ve seen this woman put an entire room of people to sleep with the wave of a hand, why would we be worried for her when a smaller gang is pointing guns at her? (And why wouldn’t she just pull the same trick here, instead of wasting her time with showier and less believable feats?)

The movie occasionally attempts to make Lucy’s quest accessible to mortal viewers. Though she doesn’t need the assistance of a French cop named Del Rio ( Amr Waked ), for instance, she keeps him with her as “a reminder” of her fading humanity. But the reality-based action (a long, wrong-way trip through Paris traffic; a showdown with gangsters who want their drugs back) feels irrelevant to what the film really wants to show us. Unfortunately, though it concludes with a line suggesting Lucy has finally found all the answers, Lucy never tells us what the question is.

Production company: EuropaCorp Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman, Min-sik Choi, Amr Waked, Julian Rhind-Tutt Director-Screenwriter: Luc Besson Producer: Virginie Silla Executive producer: Marc Shmuger Director of photography: Thierry Arbogast Production designer: Hugues Tissandier Costume designer: Olivier Beriot Editor: Julien Rey Music: Eric Serra

Rated R, 90 minutes

THR Newsletters

Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day

More from The Hollywood Reporter

Jane campion to receive locarno film festival lifetime achievement honor, ryan gosling says ‘the nice guys’ didn’t get a sequel because ‘angry birds’ “destroyed us”, arnold schwarzenegger reveals his machiavellian sabotage of sylvester stallone in tmz special, glen powell credits sydney sweeney for successful ‘anyone but you’ marketing campaign, box office: the lupita nyong’o-voiced ‘wild robot’ makes small change to september release date, jerry bruckheimer recalls bruce willis being “so generous” to crew on ‘armageddon’ set.

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

Movie Reviews

'lucy': hot buttered popcorn, with plenty of nuts.

Chris Klimek

As Lucy is able to use more of her brain, and her abilities continue to evolve, she looks to professor Samuel Norman — an expert on the human brain played by Morgan Freeman — for some explanations. Jessica Forde/Universal Pictures hide caption

What would you do if you could access 100 percent of your brain's potential processing power? Reverse climate change? Pick up new languages while you sleep? Pay your rent on time? Invent an iPhone capable of making and receiving telephone calls?

More important: Would you savor the salty, crunchy, hot-buttered freshness of writer-director-mogul Luc Besson's wiggedy-wack but truly, madly deeply watchable thriller Lucy — a Ritalin-spiked pixy stick of a movie that pinches almost as much from Tree of Life as it does from The Matrix — even more? Or considerably less?

If it's the latter, then I pity you, Mr. or Ms. Fully Self-Actualized.

Look, this was already Scarlett Johansson's year: Just in the past eight months, she's given movie-elevating performances as the voice of Samantha, the self-aware operating system in Her (way to steal a film where we never even see you!); as the canny covert operative Black Widow in Captain America: The Winter Soldier (way not to get buried amid all that expensive pixel-smashing!); and, most spectacularly, as a mysterious being on a mysterious mission in Under the Skin, 2014's most purely cinematic film to date. Though made for a modest $13 million, it's recouped less than 20 percent of that in U.S. theatrical receipts. This is why we can't have nice movies, America. (In fact, we've had rather a lot of them this summer, no?)

Anyway, Lucy feels like the pre-chewed multiplex companion piece to that art house provocation, and a victory lap for its fascinating star. It isn't, how you say, smart , but — like last month's terrific Edge of Tomorrow — it's smarter than you expect. Which, adjusted for blockbuster inflation and high fructose corn syrup intake, feels like Very Smart Indeed, at least for the svelte 89 minutes of your life this film demands. At last, a would-be summer blockbuster that respects your time!

Arriving on the heels of the fifth Spider-Man and the seventh X-Men, Lucy channels the "Hey, Kids — SCIENCE!" spirit of early '60s Marvel Comics more truly than either of them. In those scripts that Stan "The Man" Lee used to grind out at a rate of six or seven per month, exposure to radiation invariably conferred superpowers instead of cancer. Well. Lucy does for recreational drugs what The Fantastic Four did for Gamma Rays. If the overdose is massive enough and the dope powerful enough, it unlocks doors previously accessible only to those who've read The Secret . Or Flowers for Algernon.

For the first 10 minutes, our Lucy (ScarJo) is just a party-loving American expat in Taipei who has fallen in with a really wrong crowd. A family of mobsters commanded by Choi Min-sik — the South Korean star of Park Chan-wook's admirably sick-minded international hit Oldboy — sews a bag of superdope inside her gut against her will, which is as every bit as gross and terrifying as it sounds. When the bag ruptures, instead of expiring in a blast of endorphin-soaked euphoria, our Lucy finds herself crabwalkin' on the ceiling like Linda Blair. Or Lionel Ritchie. Or Spider-Pig, depending on what decade this is.

But these are mere growing pains on the bumpy road to post-biological omnipotence (so long, deodorant! Smell ya later, dental floss!), a road that — as Brilliant Neuroscientist or Something Dr. Morgan Freeman, Ph.D. (Morgan Freeman) explains in a lecture at L'Académie du Cinéma la Fausee Science et Exposition that's intercut with the drug-smuggling story — we too could travel If We Only Had The Full Use of Our Pre-Installed Brain, as the song goes.

It's actually a different Suspiciously Well-Informed Movie Doctor who has the duty of explaining to ScarJo that the stuff in her system is in fact a synthetic version of a chemical expectant mothers produce naturally to nourish the babies in their wombs. As that baby formula swims through her all-grown-up bloodstream, ScarJo begins another cycle of rapid evolution, developing the ability to manipulate her body at the cellular level, to see and manipulate radio waves, and eventually, to surf the space-time continuum from an office chair.

Which is not where I was expecting this movie to go.

Sorry, what's that? Yes, of course she's gonna take care of the rapey, tatted-up creeps who tried to make her their drug mule. Lucy goes from tearful sheep to cold-eyed wolf in one scene, but why make us wait? After efficiently sating our bloodlust for those degenerates, the movie gets on to other, more interesting business. Namely, Lucy has to get herself to Dr. Freeman so her unprecedented advance in human evolution can be observed and documented and written about in goop magazine. She also needs to acquire the rest of the stash — there were other mules, you see — "for medicinal purposes," as she deadpans. (This is a movie that confidently understands what its druggies want: More drugs! ALL OF THE DRUGS!)

Besson — best known for the odd and visually rich action pictures La Femme Nikita, Léon : The Professional , and The Fifth Element — churns out films at a tireless pace, but it's been a long while since a picture he directed made much of a splash in Cinémas américains. Last year, his witness protection comedy The Family did a fast fade, despite the presence of Robert De Niro, Tommy Lee Jones and the too-seldom-seen Michelle Pfeiffer. We tend to prefer the Transporter and Taken franchises, wherein Besson, credited as a writer and producer, seems to scribble a few notes on a bar napkin and leave the stunt coordinators to work out the rest. (Which is not to deny Liam Neeson's A Very Particular Set of Skills telephone monologue from Taken its rightful place as the St. Crispin's Day speech of the 21st century.)

Lucy is a welcome reminder of just how much Besson's wry sensibility as a filmmaker adds to movies like this. It opens with a shamelessly prurient extreme close-up of cell division while Eric Serra's vaguely porn-y slow-jam score bumps and grinds along. When Lucy is in danger, Besson (who also edited the picture) cuts to shots of a big cat stalking a gazelle. Later, we get flashes of animals (and humans) mating and giving birth, a real-time, channel-surfing commentary on the story we're watching. It seems impossible that no filmmaker has thought to do this already, but I can't think of one offhand. Good job, Monsieur Besson.

Like so many other movies this summer, this is an international affair, traveling from Taipei to Berlin to Paris. Egyptian actor Amr Waked even gets a second-banana role as a bewildered Parisian police captain.

But Besson finds a way to make his obligatory superhero origin scenes feel fresh. In the funniest doctor visit in a movie since the xenomorph abortion in Prometheus , Lucy corrals a surgeon at gunpoint and orders him to remove the leaking bag of superdope. While he's doing that, she phones home. One of the drug's early effects is total recall of everything she's ever experienced. "I can remember the taste of your milk," she tells her bewildered mom. At least one person in the theater groaned in revulsion, but I thought it was touching.

The climax, set in Paris, crosscuts Lucy's meetup with a roomful of the World's Most Brilliant Scientists with a gunbattle between the French police and the Taiwanese gangsters in the corridors outside. (Smuggling drugs through customs requires surgical rape, but flying from Taipei to Paris with enough fully automatic weapons to storm the Bastille all over again ain't no thing, apparently.) Besson cuts the shootout in a way that conveys his diminished interest in it: One insert shows a statue, probably hundreds of years old, losing its nose to a stray round. Always these morons and their guns, its expression seems to say.

Meanwhile at the grown-up table, ScarJo holds court with the eggheads. "Now that I have access to the furthest reaches of my brain, I see things clearly," she begins.

It doesn't even sound clunky when she says it. Now that , ladies and gentlemen, is a movie star.

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

Remember Limitless , the 2011 thriller in which Bradley Cooper becomes a whirling killer dervish from a drug that lets him access 100 percent of his brain? Well, Lucy is basically the same movie with Scarlett Johansson in the Cooper role. It’s not a good trade-off.

Taylor Swift and Jack Antonoff Have Reached Their Limit

Meet the girthmaster, the onlyfans creator who makes up to $80,000 per month, opioids came for country music. it’s fighting back, from vmas drama to 'thank you aimee': a timeline of taylor swift's feud with kim kardashian, kanye west.

Johansson’s Lucy is 100 percent in the looks department. Otherwise she’s just a student in Taiwan who gets tricked into becoming a drug moll for the sadistic Mr. Jang (Choi Min Sik). When the drug implanted into her intestines springs a leak, Lucy is suddenly a superbrain, capable of all kinds of things, kinky and lethal.

It sounds cool. Plus I’m basically a sucker for filmmaker Luc Besson’s female warriors, from La Femme Nikita (Anne Parillaud) to The Professional (Natalie Portman) and The Fifth Element (Milla Jovovich). And, hell, Johansson can do everything Cooper does, and in heels. But Besson lets the fun drain out of Lucy . Things get all pokey and ponderous when Morgan Freeman shows up as a professor who explains the “meaning” of what’s going on. What starts as a batshit female revenge fantasy ends as a bad LSD trip. Talk about a buzzkill.

Watch Jennifer Garner, Mark Ruffalo, Judy Greer Celebrate '13 Going on 30' Anniversary

• Flirty and Thriving
• By Emily Zemler

Crew Members Injured in Crash on Set of Eddie Murphy Film 'The Pickup'

• Accident Prone

Channing Tatum's Private Fantasy Island Turns Nightmarish in 'Blink Twice' Trailer

• FKA 'Pussy Island'
• By Tomás Mier

Jennifer Lopez Hunts Down AI Simu Liu in New ‘Atlas’ Trailer

• AI v. Humankind
• By Althea Legaspi

'Boy Kills World': See Bill Kill. Kill, Bill, Kill!

• MOVIE REVIEW
• By David Fear

Most Popular

Anne hathaway says 'gross' chemistry test in the 2000s required her to make out with 10 guys: that's the 'worst way to do it' and 'now we know better', quentin tarantino no longer making 'the movie critic' as final film, prince william’s bond with his in-laws sheds a light on his 'chilly' relationship with these royals, judge grants nicki minaj's husband, kenneth petty, permission to travel internationally for 'pink friday 2' tour, you might also like, suspense thriller ‘barren land,’ from ‘money heist’ director albert pintó, snapped up by film factory (exclusive), 1 granary launches virtual mentorship program with tencel, the best yoga mats for any practice, according to instructors, stephen colbert once laughed so hard at ‘tropic thunder’ his wife thought he was dying, ftc noncompete ban looms over sports execs, coaches, nil.

Rolling Stone is a part of Penske Media Corporation. © 2024 Rolling Stone, LLC. All rights reserved.

Verify it's you

Please log in.

Home — Essay Samples — Entertainment — Movie Review — “Lucy” by Luc Besson: Film Review

"Lucy" by Luc Besson: Film Review

• Categories: Film Analysis Movie Review

About this sample

Words: 514 |

Published: Jul 17, 2018

Words: 514 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Works Cited:

• Bayley, D. H. (1994). Police for the future. Oxford University Press.
• Gilling, D., & Pawson, J. (1985). Crime, poverty and the environment. Longman.
• Kelling, G. L., & Coles, C. M. (1996). Fixing broken windows: Restoring order and reducing crime in our communities. Simon and Schuster.
• National Institute of Justice. (2015). Understanding property crime. Retrieved from https://www.nij.gov/topics/crime/property-crime/Pages/welcome.aspx
• National Police Foundation. (2017). Police corruption: An analytical look into police ethics. Retrieved from https://www.policefoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/An-Analytical-Look-into-Police-Ethics.pdf
• O’Reilly, T. (2016). Security camera system design and implementation for industrial and commercial applications. Wiley.
• Pease, K. (1998). Repeat victimization. Criminal Justice Press.
• Rosenbaum, D. P., & Lurigio, A. J. (1994). Crime and the economy. Sage Publications.
• Smith, D. A., & Jarjoura, G. R. (1988). Social structure and criminal victimization. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 25(1), 27-52.
• Wilson, J. Q., & Kelling, G. L. (1982). Broken windows: The police and neighborhood safety. The Atlantic Monthly, 249(3), 29-38.

Cite this Essay

Let us write you an essay from scratch

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Prof. Kifaru

Verified writer

• Expert in: Entertainment

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

4 pages / 1710 words

5 pages / 2217 words

10.5 pages / 4766 words

3 pages / 1291 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays on Movie Review

Every story has a heroic journey. In Steven Spielberg 1998 action movie Saving Private Ryan, Captain John H. Miller is sent to retrieve Private Ryan, the last of four brothers, and to send him home. Lt. Col Anderson tells him [...]

The main vision of coach was realistic and long-term action oriented, thinking, interpreting and decision taking by focusing on future consequences. His vision covered wide, broader aspects of life which included not only [...]

Jon Snow, Robb Stark, Eddard Stark, Bran Stark, Daenerys Targaryen are some of the main characters in the book “Game of Thrones.”Jon Snow is the bastard son of Eddard Stark. He is raised by Eddard and his wife Catelyn Tully [...]

The controversy surrounding Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho and Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange relates primarily to the central themes that are explored in both books. Nevertheless, the brutality and explicit [...]

Following the publication of his most notable work, A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess commented on the function of literature in a mutable society. There is not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility [...]

Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange is a novel pervaded by a multifaceted and intrinsic musical presence. Protagonist Alex’s fondness for classical music imbues his character with interesting dimensions, and resonates well [...]

Related Topics

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Where do you want us to send this sample?

By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy.

Be careful. This essay is not unique

This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before

Download this Sample

Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts

Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper.

Please check your inbox.

We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together!

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, a girl and her dog on the lonesome road.

Now streaming on:

I know so much about Wendy, although this movie tells me so little. I know almost nothing about where she came from, what her life was like, how realistic she is about the world, where her ambition lies. But I know, or feel, everything about Wendy at this moment: stranded in an Oregon town, broke, her dog lost, her car a write-off, hungry, friendless, quiet, filled with desperate resolve.

Kelly Reichardt's "Wendy and Lucy" is another illustration of how absorbing a film can be when the plot doesn't stand between us and a character. There is no timetable here. Nowhere Wendy came from, nowhere she's going to, no plan except to get her car fixed and feed her dog. Played by Michelle Williams , she has a gaze focused inward, on her determination. We pick up a few scraps: Her sister in Indiana is wary of her, and she thinks she might be able to find a job in a fish cannery in Ketchikan, Alaska.

But Alaska seems a long way to drive from Indiana just to get a job in a cannery, and this movie isn't about the unemployment rate. Alaska perhaps appeals to Wendy because it is as far away she can drive where they still speak English. She parks on side streets and sleeps in her car, she has very limited cash, her golden retriever Lucy is her loving companion. She wakes up one morning somewhere in Oregon, her car won't start and she's out of dog food, and that begins a chain of events that leads to wandering around a place she doesn't know for her only friend in the world.

When I say I know all about Wendy, that's a tribute to Michelle Williams' acting, Kelly Reichardt's direction and the cinematography of Sam Levy. They use Williams' expressive face, often forlorn, always hopeful, to show someone who embarked on an unplanned journey, has gone too far to turn back. And right now, she doesn't care about anything but getting her friend back. Her world is seen as the flat everyday world of shopping malls and storefronts, rail tracks and not much traffic, skies that the weatherman calls "overcast." You know those days when you walk around, and the weather makes you feel in your stomach that something is not right? Cinematography can make you feel like that.

She walks. She walks all the way to the dog pound and back. All the way to an auto shop and back. And back to what? She sleeps in a park. The movie isn't about people molesting her, although she has one unpleasant encounter. Most people are nice, like a mechanic ( Will Patton ), and especially a security guard of retirement age (Wally Dalton) whose job is to stand and look at a mostly empty parking lot for 12 hours and guard against a nonexistent threat to its empty spaces.

Early in the film, the teenage supermarket employee ( John Robinson ) who busts Wendy for shoplifting won't give her a break. He's a little suckup who possibly wants to impress his boss with an unbending adherence to "store policy." Store policy also probably denies him health benefits and overtime, and if he takes a good look at Wendy, he may be seeing himself, minus the uniform with the logo and the nametag on it.

The people in the film haven't dropped out of life; they've been dropped by life. It has no real use for them, and not much interest. They're on hold. At least searching for your lost dog is a consuming passion; it gives Wendy a purpose and the hope of joy at the end. That's what this movie has to observe, and it's more than enough.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

Now playing

In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon

Clint worthington.

Stress Positions

Peter sobczynski.

We Were the Lucky Ones

Robert daniels.

Monica Castillo

The First Omen

Tomris laffly.

Peyton Robinson

Film credits.

Wendy and Lucy (2009)

Rated R for language

Will Oldham as Icky

John Robinson as Andy

Michelle Williams as Wendy

Will Patton as Mechanic

• Jonathan Raymond

Directed by

• Kelly Reichardt

Latest blog posts

He's Got Something Going On: David Proval on Mean Streets, and Acting for Martin Scorsese

Girl Shy and the Birth of the Romantic Comedy

New 2025 Oscar Rules Specify New Composer Eligibility, Inclusion Requirements, No More Drive-In Eligibility

Luca Guadagnino Is Love

Ör: Ambulans , 7. Koğuştaki Mucize , John Wick 4 , Top Gun 2

Lucy eleştirileri

88 kullanıcı yorumları.

Takipçi 873 değerlendirmeler Takip Et!

Takipçi 73 değerlendirmeler Takip Et!

Takipçi 31 değerlendirmeler Takip Et!

Takipçi 22 değerlendirmeler Takip Et!

Takipçi 1 değerlendirme Takip Et!

Takipçi 308 değerlendirmeler Takip Et!

1 değerlendirme Takip Et!

Takipçi 59 değerlendirmeler Takip Et!

Takipçi 28 değerlendirmeler Takip Et!

Takipçi 11 değerlendirmeler Takip Et!

Takipçi 1.698 değerlendirmeler Takip Et!

Takipçi 204 değerlendirmeler Takip Et!

Takipçi 58 değerlendirmeler Takip Et!

Takipçi 2 değerlendirmeler Takip Et!

• En son Beyazperde eleştirileri
• En İyi Filmler
• Basın Puanlarına Göre En İyi Filmler