This has been Scarlett Johansson’s defining year. Previously seeming a slightly dazed, limited beauty, she bravely abandoned her comfort zone in Jonathan Glazer’s gruelling and strange Scottish s.f. vision Under the Skin, then had her biggest hit with Luc Besson’s Lucy.
Lucy is a fun-loving student whose time in Taiwan takes a turn for the worse when she is handcuffed and flung into the clutches of Korean gangster Mr. Jang (Oldboy’s Choi Min-sik). A bag of CBH4, a drug accelerating our brains’ supposed 10 percent usage is sewn inside her, bursts when she’s kicked, and floods her system. Powering towards 100 percent and pursued by Jang’s legions, she seeks out Morgan Freeman’s professor in Paris and gains God-like powers, manipulating molecules, space and time.
A Freeman-narrated documentary extra attempts to explain Lucy’s scientific basis. Better to dial your rational brain down when considering Lucy’s omnipotent abilities. The ludicrous and the excessive are more familiar companions to Besson than hard science. His fusing of cosmic philosophy to car chases and grenade-launcher-aided shoot-outs with the Paris P.D. is a pleasant change from his production line of vengeful middle-aged male action flicks, finding real poetry when a present-day Paris street falls away and Lucy sees its past, from 19th century dirt-track to the primordial ooze.
Johansson’s transformation is equally extreme. She unfussily conveys fear as gangsters abuse her, panic as drug side-effects start to melt her beautiful face, and stoicism as her experiment in evolution appears fatal. As she becomes ultra-human, there is a touch, too, of her Under the Skin alien, a useful, understated oddness she has added to her glamorous young everywoman image.
Johansson has carried two contrasting, bonkers conceits in 2014, when not perking up Captain America. Lucy is the entertaining, hugely flawed break-out hit that confirms her stardom.
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