Sweet baby Jesus, I feel significantly dumber for having watched that film.
I’d avoided it because of the stupid premise - the idiot idea that we only use 10% of our brain - but fancied a daft action flick, saw it on Netflix and thought “yeah, go on then.” I can suspend disbelief if a piece of work puts in the effort and remains internally consistent, after all.
Unfortunately, this film was not only more stupid than I anticipated, but possibly more stupid than I could have anticipated.
I’d heard enough to know that Scarlett Johansson got a package of drugs sewn into her abdomen by Korean gangsters, which was ruptured leading to her apotheosis - but as soon as this happens she begins to defy gravity.
Oh-kay, thinks I, is this a metaphor for the effects of the drug? If it was, I’d expect some change in lighting or some other visual queue. I suspect not.
Oh, she is instantly able to kill one of the bad guys with her bare hands and shoot another six like a videogame character.
And it just gets more idiotic. The character, Lucy, quickly develops god-like powers which she then fails to use when it would have been useful to do so. After the initial assault on Lucy, she is so powerful there is no sense of threat, no stakes whatsoever, as she can do literally anything she wants. And some of the lines are just cringeworthy; both Johansson and Morgan Freeman state “we were given life a billion years ago” - aside from a huge problem with the word “given”, this is just wrong as a quick visit to wikipedia would show. Freeman is supposed to be one of the world’s leading genetic researches but every word that comes out of his mouth is utter nonsense.
It isn’t a total shitshow - some of the visuals and action scenes are quite striking, and I’m actually quite impressed that Johansson and Freeman somehow manage to deliver their absolutely insane dialogue with a straight face (“you can type this shit, Luc, but you can’t say it!”)
Three out of ten if I’m being generous.
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