Movie Review: Lucy

Back when I was watching WWE Raw live, before I gave up on trying to make it through three hours and instead went to the condensed version on Hulu+, I saw commercials for this movie.   It was one of those movies that had that cool trailer and it made me think that I wanted to actually go and see this in theaters.   (I didn't though)  It also made me look up the director and want to watch his other movies.  (I didn't though)    When this was finally released on DVD I got it with a free rental coupon from Redbox and was ready for it.

So here's the deal with this movie.    Lucy ends up taking a drug, which is from a nutrient inside pregnant women that helps the babies brains grow, and it makes her brain activity spike as humans only use 10% of their brains.    This leads to an interesting series of events but as humans only use 10% of their brains in real life it becomes pretty clearly science fiction.      In some ways, the basis of the story reminds me of the recent plot on "Gotham", which introduced the character of the Scarecrow, about how they can actually take the fear out of people in a scientific way.

At its base this is an action movie.   I've never been a fan of Scarlett Johanssen and I find her involvement in the Avengers movie series to be less than tolerable, but somehow in this movie that all goes away because her acting is much more robotic and, really, how hard can it be to mess that up?  (She may also just be disliked by me in Avengers because of her involvement with my least favorite Avenger, Hawkeye)

Even if you don't want to follow the story within the science fiction aspects of this movie, if you are a fan of good old fashioned revenge movies then this is for you.    Lucy is out to do whatever she has to in order to take out the people who gave her these drugs and it comes out somewhere between "Kill Bill" and "Crank", as it has that sort of time limit feel on it.

I might watch this movie again and see if there was anything that I perhaps missed the first time around, but then again I may not.   Regardless of what I do, this is one of those movies that everyone should see at least once just to make you think.   I'm not sure how I would have felt if I actually went to the theaters to see this and luckily I don't have to know but as far as free Redbox rentals it's one of the better choices you could make.