Lucy

For F*** Magazine

LUCY

Director : Luc Besson
Cast : Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman, Analeigh Tipton, Choi Min-sik, Amr Waked
Genre : Action/Thriller
Opens : 21 August 2014
Rating : NC-16 (Some Drug References and Violence)
Running time: 90 mins

In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Scarlett Johansson kicks a lot of ass as Black Widow but doesn’t have any actual superpowers to speak of. As the eponymous Lucy, she has all the superpowers. Just your average girl abroad, Lucy gets mixed up with the wrong crowd in Taipei and is made an unwilling drug mule for Korean crime lord Mr. Jang (Choi). Inserted into her abdomen is a packet of blue crystals known as CPH4. When the drugs enter her system following an encounter with some thugs, Lucy begins to tap into the unmined potential of her brain. She contacts Professor Samuel Norman (Freeman), the leading expert in this area. According to Prof Norman, humans use only 10% of their cerebral capacity. As the drug’s effects strengthen, Lucy inches towards optimizing 100% of her mind, giving her the power over her own body, the bodies of others and matter itself. As she heads towards omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence, what’s next?

            From The Messenger: the Story of Joan of Arc to La Femme Nikita to The Fifth Element and to a different extent The Lady, writer-director Luc Besson’s forte is making extraordinarily skilled, powerful women look awesome. He’s at it again in Lucy, with Scarlett Johansson stepping in the shoes once filled by a young Natalie Portman and Milla Jovovich.  We’ll give Lucy this: it’s ambitious and it’s different. Besson could’ve been content with churning out a run-of-the-mill actioner and apparently, he isn’t. This strange beast of a sci-fi action fantasy flick has been only semi-facetiously compared to Terence Malick’s The Tree of Life. Mixed in with the requisite gunplay and car chases through Paris are scenes of an Australopithecus drinking from a prehistoric lake. This touch also imbues the name “Lucy” with extra significance.

            Unfortunately, it is very often evident that Besson has bitten off more than he can chew. “Humans are concerned more with having than being,” Professor Norman says during an expository lecture. This sort of faux-portentous philosophising is served with a side of heavy-handed symbolism: Lucy being recruited for the delivery job in the beginning of the film is intercut with footage of a mouse approaching a mousetrap and of a cheetah hunting gazelles. Cue the eye-rolling. Sometimes, it’s hard to discern if Besson truly thinks this is a deep, contemplative masterpiece or if he is aware that Lucy is simply a gleefully silly romp. The answer to “life, the universe and everything” makes even less sense than “42”, the answer famously put forth in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And let’s not forget that the “10% of the brain” myth is discredited, misleading pseudo-science.

            Johansson zones in as the superhuman Lucy and plays the transition from scared, naïve girl in over her head to single most powerful being in the world with entertaining élan. Lucy engages in more than a few morally dubious acts, but Johansson makes us cheer the character along regardless. Morgan Freeman once again does that thing he’s been doing lately: showing up in a movie to lend authority without doing any real acting. But hey, when you’ve got Morgan Freeman spouting all that techno-babble, it probably subconsciously lends it some credence. Choi Min-sik, Oldboy himself, is a suitably commanding presence as a downright scary career criminal who, after slaughtering a room full of innocent hotel guests, washes his hands with a bottle of Evian. Amr Waked is good as Captain Del Rio, the hapless cop dragged through Paris by Lucy as a “reminder” of her humanity. Fans of British TV will also get a kick out of Julian Rhind-Tutt hamming it up as he forces the drug mules’ mission upon them.

            While a lot of it can be seen as wrongheaded and embarrassing, Lucy is very entertaining once the CPH4 is in her system and the plot gets into gear. There’s also lots of trippy imagery (strands of light over Paris! Shapeshifting arms! Nebulae in deep space!), created by Industrial Light & Magic, Rodeo FX and other visual effects houses. A scene set in an airplane is quite intense. Luc Besson’s regular cinematographer Theirry Arbogast and composer Eric Serra make the film a rather sumptuous sensory feast, in a way different from the biggest, most explosive blockbusters out there.

Summary: It’s high-falutin’ and quite silly, but dazzling visuals, fun action and a commanding lead performance by Scarlett Johansson make Lucy a halfway-decent diversion.

RATING: 3 out of 5 Stars

Jedd Jong 

3 Days to Kill

For F*** Magazine

3 DAYS TO KILL

Director: McG
Cast:         Kevin Costner, Amber Heard, Hailee Steinfeld, Connie Nielsen
Genre: Action, Thriller
Run Time: 100 mins
Opens: 6 March 2014
Rating: TBA

After playing Pa Kent in last year’s Man Of Steel, Kevin Costner is pulling daddy duty again in 3 Days To Kill. This time, he’s playing veteran CIA agent Ethan Renner, who is stricken with brain cancer that has spread to his lungs. On the brink of death, he is offered a miracle drug by fellow CIA agent Vivi (Heard) in exchange for a successful kill. The target: terrorist arms dealer Wolfgang “The Wolf” Braun (Richard Sammel). With mere months left to live, Ethan goes to Paris where his estranged daughter Zoey (Steinfeld) is living with her mother, Ethan’s ex-wife Christine (Nielsen). Having neglected his wife and daughter due to the obligations of his dangerous job, Ethan must make up for lost time, fight through the drug’s hallucinogenic side effects and stop the Wolf once and for all.

Moviegoers know what to expect from Luc Besson, who established his brand of Euro-action in the 90s and has been directing and producing such genre entries ever since. Besson co-wrote 3 Days to Kill with Adi Hasak, but directing duties were handled by McG who, suffice it to say, is not the most popular director out there. 3 Days To Kill is something of a mess but at least it doesn’t look it, cinematographer Thierry Arbogast having lensed Besson movies such as La Femme Nikita, Léon and The Fifth Element. Beautiful sunrises over Paris and seedy, neon-lit nightspots get showcased in equal measure. However, this can’t help but lend a certain ersatz quality to the film; that McG is trying his hardest to approximate that Besson look and it comes off as self-conscious. Furthermore, the premise is practically identical to that of Besson’s French TV series No Limit.




3 Days To Kill feels like two different movies hastily stitched together, in many ways coming off like an unsuccessful version of True Lies. In both films, a spy has to address domestic problems in his family life while saving the day. However, True Lies was an all-out action comedy, while 3 Days To Kill is unable to settle on a tone. It wants to be taken seriously as an action thriller and there are some fairly brutal combat sequences and a violent onscreen death or two. However, we’re also supposed to be invested in the melodramatic tale of a duty-bound father trying his hardest to reconnect with his stubborn, distant teenager. In addition to that, the film’s attempts at humour are awkward and misjudged. For example, lots of serious confrontations get interrupted by Icona Pop’s cheerful I Love It, which Zoey has chosen as her father’s cell-phone ringtone.

Costner has been trying for a comeback and appears to be after a Liam Neeson-style career renaissance – after all, Taken was also produced by Luc Besson. Costner is okay but he lacks Neeson’s intensity and just comes across as somewhat bored, at times dangerously close to phoning it in Bruce Willis-style. Steinfeld’s Zoey is a thinly-sketched bundle of “rebellious teen” clichés, right down to her petulant insistence on addressing her father by his first name. Steinfeld is certainly better than this, but the character is just annoyingly written. Heard does a lot of posturing as a femme fatale, her exaggerated appearance with that peroxide blonde do and uber-red lips making it seem as though she’s just walked off the set of Machete Kills. Also, it’s never made clear why Vivi can’t just kill the Wolf herself.



3 Days To Kill isn’t exactly a run-of-the-mill, formulaic spy action flick, but it seems it might have been better off as one. Even with a ticking-clock element built in, the film fails to muster a sense of urgency or tension. That’s because the secondary plot involving Ethan’s reconciliation with his daughter is shoved to the fore, stopping the action from gaining any proper momentum and feeling like someone’s changed the channel from a spy thriller to a sappy family drama. While the tonal dissonance isn’t quite as jarring as in Besson’s own Malavita/The Family/We’re a Nice Normal Family, it still gets in the way of what could’ve been a slick if forgettable actioner. The presence of a large family led by patriarch Jules (Eriq Ebouaney) who are squatters in Ethan’s flat is an obvious attempt to up the heart-warming quotient. Add stereotypical comic-relief side characters like limo driver Mitat (Marc Andréoni) and Italian Guido (Bruno Ricci) to the mix and 3 Days To Kill just ends up being muddled and unsatisfying.

Summary: An awkward combination of father-daughter relationship drama and espionage action thriller, 3 Days To Kill fails to hold together.

RATING: 2 out of 5 Stars

Jedd Jong

Taken 2

For F*** Magazine, Singapore

TAKEN 2

Director:	Olivier Megaton
Cast:	Liam Neeson, Maggie Grace, Famke Janssen, Rade Šerbedžija
Genre:	Action, Thriller
Run Time:	94 mins
Opens:	4 October 2012
Rating:	PG13 - Some Violence

2008’s Taken was a film that, well, took many by surprise. It was something of a sleeper hit, giving its star Liam Neeson a second wind as a viable action hero, and it also made $226,830,568 on a $26.5 million budget. You know what that means: sequel time!

Taken 2 fashions itself as a revenge story - Murad Hoxha (Šerbedžija), the head of the Albanian mafia, is none too happy about the body count from the first film, his son among them. So, he vows to take revenge on Bryan Mills (Neeson) on behalf of the rest of the Albanian village too. Mills takes his ex-wife Lenore (Janssen), going through a rough patch with her current husband, and his daughter Kim (Grace) along with him to Istanbul for a family vacation of sorts. It is there that the tables are turned on him, as Bryan and Lenore are taken, leaving Kim to figure out how to get to them as the bad guys chase after her as well.

Most moviegoers, upon hearing news of a Taken sequel being made, probably had the same thought – “the first one was cool, but do we need a second?” Taken seemed like the kind of film that would receive a shoddy direct-to-video sequel featuring a completely different cast with the exact same premise, so perhaps it can be considered good news that Neeson and co. are back for a proper part deux, with Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen also returning to script the movie.

However, Pierre Morel is not back in the director’s chair – in his stead is Olivier Megaton, who directed the Luc Besson-produced films Transporter 3 and Colombiana - and yes, that is his real name. Megaton keeps the film at a frenetic pace once the actual ‘taking’ takes place, but perhaps it’s a little too frenetic for its own good. There are quick cuts and editing flourishes, and where the first film felt as fluid as it was dynamic, here it’s a bit more choppy.

One could be mean and say that the story is not much more than a rehash of the first and truth is, it kind of is – the main difference being that it’s Bryan and Lenore who are kidnapped, with Kim in a position to aid her parents’ escape. Surprisingly, the movie takes its time with its opening scenes, which reintroduce the characters and establish how their relationships have changed since the events of the first movie – Bryan, ever the over-protective dad, not taking kindly to news that Kim now has a boyfriend (Luke Grimes).

This, however, may leave some audience members twiddling their thumbs. It’s a good thing then that when the film kicks into high gear, it doesn’t stop. The filmmakers take advantage of Istanbul’s potential as an action movie location (Bond will next be headed there in Skyfall) and there is a series of foot and vehicular chases through the back alleys and across the rooftops of the Turkish capital. Thing is, we really have seen it all before – and done a smidge better – in the original Taken.

Neeson is as good as he normally is, turning up the intensity and furrowing his brow as only he can. Most of his dialogue is very cut-and-dried and matter of fact, which can be a little hard to take seriously given how his terse speech from the first movie has been reduced to not much more than an internet meme. Famke Janssen has more screen time but not all that much more to do, panicking and crying through most of the movie. Maggie Grace’s part gets more of an upgrade, and you get the sense that Kim has learned a fair bit from her experiences in Paris, and with her father’s guidance possesses a degree of competence (and gets to toss a few grenades to boot). Rade Šerbedžija is stoic as the villain, but not as imposing or frightening as he could have been, and it ends up such that the lower-level grunts seem to pose more of a threat than the head of the Albanian mafia himself.

Is Taken 2 a decent film on its own merits? Yes. But is it an absolutely necessary sequel? No. Was it made primarily as a cash-grab? Probably, and unfortunately, yes.

SUMMARY: Taken 2 passes muster as an action film in the vein of its predecessor, even if it never quite matches it in quality - it’s a little “run of the Mills”, as it were.

RATING: 3 out of 5 STARS

Jedd Jong