LUCY: Nonsense You Should Watch

Let’s just get this out of the way, shall we? Lucy is a hot mess. You should watch it anyway.

There’s almost no point in giving a synopsis of the film, because if you’ve seen the trailer, you know what the story is. Still, in case you have missed it, I’ll give you the high points:

Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) has a terrible boyfriend and lives in Taiwan, where she is forced to become a drug mule by having a disturbingly large amount of an experimental superdrugs sewn into her abdomen. Terrible people beat her, the drugs leak into her bloodstream, and Lucy becomes God and has her vengeance.

That’s really the whole movie. And it’s full of nonsense. All the nonsense. So much nonsense.

You should watch it anyway.

Yes, the whole “Humans only use 10% of their brains” nonsense is just the tip of the terrible science in this movie, and yes, it has plot holes HAL could fly the Discovery and the Monolith through, and yes, there is a moment where you realize that about half the film simply shouldn’t have happened, if only Lucy had done the only rational thing at a particular moment, and the only reason she didn’t was because she was written that way.

Lucy is not a film for thinking about. It really isn’t. Yes, there are lots of terrible science things being thrown about, and things that are clearly meant to be philosophical questions, and even a touch of morality, but really, just ignore those things. They don’t survive any real examination, and they aren’t the point, however much they keep getting repeated.

Why should you watch it? Because Lucy is a comic book superhero movie with a female lead and it’s just as good — if not better — than many other films with terrible science and nonsense that star men in exactly the same kind of role. Because women and men are clamoring for a Black Widow movie, for a Wonder Woman movie, for action and comic book movies with strong female leads, and going to see Lucy is going to make the studios who keep failing to grasp that women make up almost half of the audience of Avengers, Iron Man, Man of Steel and the Dark Knight trilogy notice. Its silly story makes as much sense as the Matrix movies did, and Scarlett Johansson does blank god-face better than Keanu does, and if it succeeds, the studios might give us the Black Widow movie, and the Wonder Woman movie, and a She-Hulk series on Netflix and stop cancelling excellent animated series like Young Justice, because “too many girls watch the show”.

Which is a thing that actually happened.

Look, Lucy is not a film to think about, it’s a film to watch and enjoy for what it is… a Luc Besson eye-candy picture, with Scarlett Johansson being a bad-ass superhero, Morgan Freeman being the Wise Elder, and Amr Waked being the Honest Cop In Over His Head. It’s an entertaining hour and a half that shows that a female lead can carry a superhero film, and rake in $44 million on its opening weekend, and it’s the gateway drug, forgive the pun, to a cinema where the studios stop thinking that the only films women can carry are romantic comedies and period dramas.

We know they can, in fact they have been doing it for years and years and years, but the studios need reminding, and that, ladies and gentlemen, is why you should go see Lucy.