Lucy - review

*Warning - this review will go into some plot details from the end of the film so this is your SPOILER warning*

First thing's first, I love Lucy. But enough about my girlfriend, what about the film?

Scarlett Johansson continues her stellar 2014 which has already seen her appear four times in my Top 20 of 2014 thanks to performances in Her, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Chef and Under The Skin.

Tricked by her boyfriend into delivering a briefcase to some nefarious gangsters, Lucy is forced into becoming a drugs mule by having a bag of drugs sewn into her stomach.

I can only assume that it is Heisenberg's crystal meth as it is blue in colour and she is shipped to Europe which is where all the kids were going crazy for it.

Attacked by her kidnappers, the bag of drugs bursts and it seeps into her bloodstream thus increasing her brain capacity to exponential rates, unlocking areas of her brain previously unused which give her special abilities, which she uses to gain revenge on her captors.

At the same time, because she can multitask due to her powers (and being a woman), she is talking to a scientist (played by Morgan Freeman) about controlling her abilities and ways to preserve her increasing knowledge and intelligence.

As Lucy reaches 100% capacity, she attempts to achieve transcendence and uploads her consciousness to an artificial intelligence which makes the most enjoyable way to enjoy Lucy is viewing it as a direct prequel to Her in which she is the voice of the OS1 operating system.

Luc Besson has a great history in creating strong female characters such as Matilda in Leon and LeeLoo Dallas Mooltipass and Lucy is his most delightfully demented slice of Sci-Fi action since The Fifth Element in an episode one could call The Outer Limitless.

3 stars

3 Days To Kill - review

Have assassins and government agents never watched any films about assassins and government agents?

If they had they would know that there is no such thing as "one last job", for just like Michael Corleone "just when I thought I was out they pull me in".

One of the frequent criticisms of modern movie trailers is that they give too much away but another, perhaps even greater, sin is when a film is completely mis-sold by its trailer, usually to its detriment.

This is one of those cases.

Watch the trailer and you be forgiven for thinking that this was a film where CIA operative Kevin Costner wants to quit to spend time with his family but is poisoned and is given 3 Days To Kill a list of people in order to secure the antidote.

Sounds like a reasonable description right? Wrong!

Succumbing to illness on a mission which leads to the escape of a target, Costner is diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, given 5 months to live and future endeavoured by the CIA.
Returning to Paris to reconnect with his family, he is recruited by a shadowy agent played by Amber Heard to kill the target he missed in exchange for an experimental drug that could help prolong his life.

That is quite different no?

At first glance this looks to be another case of Taken syndrome where an ageing actor decides that instead of cashing in his pension, he cashes a pay check in order to reinvent himself as an action hero.

Even though it is written and produced by Luc Besson, it never really captures that feeling, despite another strong father-daughter relationship.

The action scenes are few and far between (and all of them feature in the trailer) and actually the film is more akin to Besson's Leon.

There are nice touches in the movie, with Costner returning home to find a group of African squatters in his flat yet unable to evict them due to the law and a relationship develops between them.

There was potential for quite an interesting take on this type of story, especially due to strong performances from Costner and Steinfeld, however an inability to decide what kind of film it wants to be, unnecessarily long running time and bland, uninvolving direction by McG (I find it interesting his name was kept off all the publicity materials) resulting in a bit of a misfire.

Despite mentioning the title in the film (always deserving of a cheer), the urgency behind the 3 Days To Kill is never felt and therefore ends up being a film that few will be Taken with.

2 stars

Brick Mansions - review

We've all experienced that feeling of déjà vu when watching a movie in the cinema where you recognise something that has been copied, referenced or homaged to from another film.

However with the sheer number of remakes happening in Hollywood right now, it is impossible to keep track of them all.

It wasn't until around 30 minutes into Brick Mansions that the déjà vu feeling of "that's like that parkour bit from District B13" turned into "wait, this IS just a remake of District B13".

So around 10 years after the initial parkour craze crossed over into the cinematic mainstream with Casino Royale and the original District B13, that film's star, and one of the pioneers of parkour, David Belle plays the same role in this US version of the story albeit one that has been dubbed over by another actor (which IMDB claims to be Vin Diesel in some sort of weird final Fast & Furious link up).

This version is set in Detroit, who must be annoyed with films like this and Robocop constantly going on about how it is the most violent city in the USA, where Brick Mansions is a ghetto project that is walled up by the city to control crime and prevent it getting into the rest of the city.

Sent into the district to find and diffuse a nuclear device that has gone missing, Paul Walker displays the blue eyed charisma of the dogged undercover cop that became his forte in the Fast & Furious franchise but thankfully with the 7th film still to come next year, this film won't be his final cinematic appearance.

Unoriginal and uninspired writing, action sequences and bad CGI are the poor quality foundations on which Brick Mansions has been built and leave it in a bigger risk of collapse then Red Road.

1 star