Luc Besson’s LUCY: Over-The-Top Yet Still Underwhelming

Opening today at a multiplex near you...

LUCY (Dir.Luc Besson, 2014)

It’s too bad that Scarlett Johansson’s Marvel Universe co-star Samuel L. Jackson isn’t here to exclaim “check out the big brain on Lucy!” PULP FICTION-style, because Luc Besson’s new sci-fi thriller keeps asking us to do just that.

Johansson’s Lucy is an American student in Taipei, Taiwan, who gets forced into being a drug mule for an evil Korean crime lord (Choi Min-sik). But the colossal catch is that the drug the bad guys implant in our protagonist is a powerful synthetic called CPH4 (which looks a lot like the bright blue crystal meth from Breaking Bad), which increases one’s control over their mind rapidly bit by bit until it reaches 100% brain capacity.

This gives Johansson hyper-intelligence, superhuman strength, and the ability to change her metabolism, but this alteration in her body’s chemistry means she’ll need more of the drug within 24 hours or she’ll start decomposing. So Johannson travels to Paris to track down the other drug mules and confiscate their CPH4 with the help of Amr Waked as a grizzled French cop.

Morgan Freeman is on hand as a neuroscientist who first appears in cutaways from the main action lecturing a college classroom his theories about the brain’s untapped potential. These bits capture Freeman in narrator mode (when is he not in narrator mode?), and, mashed with cuts to nature footage, and time lapse cinematography, serve to visually sucker punch us with heady imagery and lofty conceptual themes.

This makes for some watchable eye candy especially when it comes to the fun of seeing Johansson kick lots of ass with her mind, but all the pseudo intellectual posturing that all the collective conscience of all humanity contains the entire history of the universe and ‘wow, what if we could tap into that?’ seems purposely aimed to shoot way over the heads of most movie-goers so they’ll think the movie is way smarter than it is.

Johansson beautifully builds upon the emotionless alien persona she exhibited in Jonathan Glaser’s UNDER THE SKIN earlier this year largely because we get to witness her invested transformation from college party girl to atomic super-heroine. Unfortunately as the climax approaches, Johansson literally gets absorbed into the surreal set pieces – i.e. she morphs into a black tentacle mass of squid’s limbs taking over a computer lab – as her presence becomes less and less interesting.

LUCY takes the “Flowers for Algernon”/CHARLY – i.e. everyman takes drug and gets super smarts - scenario, also recently utilized in the Bradley Cooper vehicle LIMITLESS and filters it through the ‘to understand how we live now, let’s begin at the very beginning’ thesis of Terrence Malick’s THE TREE OF LIFE, which means, yep, there are dinosaurs. There's also a bit of Danny Boyle's time lapsing intros/outros from 127 HOURS happening too. I guess it’s all part of life’s rich pageant as Inspector Clouseau would say.

But for all these influences and/or pretensions, there’s little that’s actually thought provoking about the over-the-top yet still underwhelming LUCY. It tries so hard to be mind blowing, but it keeps coming up short. 

That said, Besson’s film is a vast improvement over THE FAMILY, his misguided mob family comedy last year, and it appealingly harkens back to his late ‘90s cult classic THE FIFTH ELEMENT. I also appreciate that it’s a summer blockbuster wannabe that isn’t a franchise entry, and isn’t in 3D.

However, no matter how much its stylish energy tries to obscure it, LUCY is a silly popcorn picture matinee masquerading as egghead cinema.

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New Releases On Blu Ray & DVD: 10/1/13

One of the raunchiest and funniest films of this year, Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen’s THIS IS THE END tops the list of new releases this week on Blu ray and DVD. The film, which features Rogen and his fellow graduates of Apatow High (and I do mean *High*), including James Franco, Jonah Hill, Craig Robinson, Danny McBride, and Jay Baruchel deal with doomsday while partying at Franco’s fortress of a homestead in the Hollywood Hills, is available in a Two Disc Combo (Blu-ray / DVD + UltraViolet Digital Copy) and a single disc DVD.

A bunch of Special Features enhance the package: Audio commentary with Goldberg and Rogen, a smattering of featurettes (“Directing Your Friends,” “Meta-Apocalypse,” “Let’s Get Technical,” “Party Time,” “The Cannibal King,” “The Making of "The Making of Pineapple Express 2”), the original “Jay & Seth vs. The Apocalypse” short that inspired the film, Line-O-Rama segments, “This is the Gag Reel,” deleted scenes, and “This is the Marketing,” a collection of satirical shorts promoting the movie.

Kirk De Micco and Chris Sanders’ prehistoric family comedy from DreamWorks Animation, THE CROODS, featuring the voices of Nicholas Cage, Emma Stone, and Ryan Reynolds, releases today in a Blu-ray 3D + Blu-ray + DVD + UltraViolet edition, a Blu-ray / DVD + Digital Copy + Toy edition, and a stand-alone DVD. Special Features include “Belt’s Cave Journal,” “Croods Cuts (Lost Scenes),” “World of DreamWorks Animation,” “Be An Artist!,” “The Croods Coloring & Storybook Builder App,” and “The Croodaceous Creatures of Croods!”

Other new titles out today: Scott Walker’s straight-to-Blu ray thriller THE FROZEN GROUND starring John Cusack as a serial killer and Nicholas Cage in non-animated form as the cop on his trail, the wilderness documentary miniseries North America narrated by Tom Selleck, and Luc Besson’s 2010 French fantasy film THE EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES OF ADELE BLANC-SEC, based on Jacques Tardi’s acclaimed series of historical fantasy comic books.

On the older films new to Blu ray front, there’s the 75th Anniversary Limited Collector’s Edition of THE WIZARD OF OZ (Blu-ray 3D / Blu-ray / DVD / UltraViolet + Amazon Exclusive Disc Drive), THE LITTLE MERMAID (Two-Disc Diamond Edition: Blu-ray / DVD + Digital Copy), and Fred Zinneman’s 1953 classic FROM HERE TO ETERNITY, the Vincent Price classic HOUSE OF WAX (also 1953) available in both 3D and standard formats, and the 1925 silent World War I epic THE BIG PARADE.

Also out this week: THE AMITYVILLE HORROR Trilogy box, which contains Stuart Rosenberg's 1979 original, starring James Brolin and Margot Kidder, packaged with the first ever Blu ray releases of AMITYVILLE II: THE POSSESION and AMITYVILLE 3-D - 2 movies that the horror community will be thrilled to finally have on the fancy format, right?

TV season sets releasing today: How I Met Your Mother: Season Eight, Beauty & the Beast: The First Season, Glee: The Complete Fourth Season, New Girl: The Complete Second Season, and the late '80s Vietnam war drama China Beach Season 1.

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THE FAMILY: Besson's Really Redundant De Niro Mob Comedy

Opening today at a theater near you:

THE FAMILY (Dir. Luc Besson, 2013)

Seeing Luc Besson’s new mob comedy THE FAMILY makes me wonder if Robert De Niro will be remembered by future generations for his roles that poked fun at his image as a scary Mafioso type, more than the classic roles in which he actually portrayed a scary Mafioso type.

Here De Niro plays a former New York mob boss, living in France with his wife (Michelle Pfeifer) and teenage offspring (John D'Leo and Glee’s Dianna Agron) under the witness relocation program.

The set-up obviously recalls the end of GOODFELLAS, in which Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill complains about getting egg noodles with ketchup when he orders spaghetti with marinara sauce after being relocated to the suburbs for snitching on his former buddies.

THE FAMILY’s wiseguy fish-out-of-water premise also recalls the 1990 Herbert Ross-helmed Steve Martin/Rick Moranis comedy MY BLUE HEAVEN (incidentally written by the late great Nora Ephron who was married to GOODFELLAS screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi).

But those reference points are over 20 years old now, so after countless spoofs of modern mafia movies, as well as six seasons of HBO’s dark comic drama The Sopranos, every trope THE FAMILY trots out has been done to death. Adapted by Tonino Benacquista from his 2010 novel “Badfellas” (that’s right), THE FAMILY has a few funny lines and a couple of decent gags, but the overly familiar structure (along with the high volume of convenient convolutions in the storyline) can't help but highlight how redundant it is.

De Niro spends the movie either trying to write his memoirs - an activity frowned on by Tommy Lee Jones as a CIA agent assigned to protect the undercover family – or trying to get somebody to do something about the brown water coming out of his house’s taps. De Niro’s worn-out character trait is that he speaks softly but will do violent damage to any non-relative who says something offensive to him. One scene has him dragging a fertilizer plant CEO behind his car for suggesting he switch to bottled water.

Pfeifer, also no stranger to this territory (see Jonathan Demme’s 1988 mob comedy MARRIED TO THE MOB), along with D’Leo and Agron, handle matters in the same abrasive manner. Pfeifer blows up a grocery store for snide remarks made at her expense by the clerks, D’Leo arranges for a brutal beating of his high school bully, and Agron makes like KICK ASS’s Hit-Girl when she takes a tennis racket to the head of a fellow student who puts the moves on her.

Trouble is that the film is so boringly broad that these scenarios have no ambition over getting cheap laughs from indiscriminate audiences. It also tries to go where it really shouldn’t when De Niro is invited to a local film club for a screening of the 1958 Frank Sinatra/Dean Martin movie SOME COME RUNNING, but there’s a mix-up and GOODFELLAS is shown instead. Besson’s film hasn’t earned that attempt at a meta moment, especially as it only aims for the funny from Jones’ grumpy cat reaction to De Niro yet again being unable to control.

After the effort De Niro put into his Oscar nominated role in SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK, it's disheartening to see him once again walk through a role. The man seriously doesn't seem to care about being the center of another self-referential mafia-themed farce - the ANALYSE THIS/THAT films should've been where he drew the line.

TV spots for the THE FAMILY highlight that Martin Scorsese was involved as one of the executive producers, even blaring an early ‘70s Rolling Stones track on top of clips (no Stones music appears in the movie) to shade the proceedings with his presence. This is an un-wiseguy move as it just calls into attention how much this film misses the mark.

Scorsese hasn’t directed De Niro since 1995’s CASINO, but a future collaboration – THE IRISHMAN based on the Charles Brandt book “I Heard You Paint Houses” - is reportedly in the works. Here’s hoping that will come together soon, because after the mess Besson has made here stumbling blindly around Marty’s territory, a clean-up crew is sorely needed.

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