Lucy (2014)

After a freak accident that hyper-charges her brain, Scarlett Johansson is the smartest superhero ever in the most out-to-lunch action movie of the summer. Tell you what’s wrong with this one: Luc Besson is out of his mind. He over-seasons his sci-fi souffle with a human evolution metaphor so heavy-handed that you feel like you’ve been knocked over the head with a brick. The bullets, bloodshed and explosions here are the quiet parts. Besson gets most noisy when he drags us through his themes. For example, someone in the film mentions birth and then Besson instantly cuts to stock footage of a cow giving birth to a calf. Then, there’s the scene toward the beginning in which Johansson is being eyed by evil Taiwanese drug dealers, which Besson intercuts with film of a cheetah that stalks a gazelle in the jungle (as if we didn’t already understand what was happening.) The best part is the ending—and I’m not being a smartass—that takes the whole affair to a cosmic level. In a way, this film is like the reverse of Richard Matheson’s The Incredible Shrinking Man, about a man who shrinks in size indefinitely until he’s so unimaginably tiny that his home becomes an alien world. Here, a woman gradually becomes omnipotent. She’s everywhere at once, but just as far gone from us as the shrinking man. Her fate follows no rules that we know. It all ends up as a mixed bag of a film, but, to its credit, a little different than what hits the multiplexes these days. At the very least, it’s the film most fixated on Scarlett Johansson’s stunningly beautiful face since Under the Skin.