Boringly superhuman

When Scarlett Johansson achieves total consciousness in Luc Besson’s sublimely ridiculous Lucy, she does not quip, like Bill Murray when granted the same Zen privilege by the Dalai Lama in Caddyshack, “So I got that going for me, which is nice.”

Probably because it isn’t nice at all. It’s hard to figure out quite what Besson is saying about the fact that most of us only use 10% of our brain’s cognitive powers, but what we see on screen is a woman who, accidentally poisoned with a massive dose of a consciousness-expanding pharmaceutical, becomes steadily less human with each incremental increase in awareness, more indefatigable, then utterly infallible, and eventually completely uninteresting.

It’s the reverse of the process Johansson undergoes in the far more captivating Under The Skin, which was a highly stylised examination of what it is to become human. But who do you root for if your heroine simply can’t be bested? Has she no Achilles Heel? What is her Kryptonite?  Where is the underdog in this scenario?

The underdog is everyone else: the people she knocks out, shoots, stabs, or glues to the ceiling with her hypertrophied atomic mind. When it turns out later on that she can change her hair colour by sheer mind-power, grow webbing on her hands and even travel through time, you just have to surrender and enjoy the ride.

Somewhere in this artificially flavoured, toxically calorific stick of Bessonian bubblegum there lurk pretensions to Kubrick’s sci-fi crown.  That’s to say it starts and ends with an ape at the dawn of time, while its protagonist as murderous as A Clockwork Orange’s Alex DeLarge has all the emotional sophistication of HAL 9000.

But it’s bogged down by oodles of exposition over here, and complete incoherence over there. For half the movie  as Lucy gets involved with the botched drug-smuggling plot that results in the super-drug, sewn into her stomach, bursting inside her  chemistry professor Morgan Freeman addresses a lecture hall in Rome so labouriously about consciousness-expansion that you wonder if he’ll ever show up in the other half of the movie.

Said other half of the movie, stripped of all its guff about total awareness from the cellular level to the cosmic etc, is warmed-over Besson Redux: hot action-heroine in the mould of La Femme Nikita, Colombiana, The Messenger and Bandidas; grimy visuals; gratuitous against-the-traffic car chases and over-edited fight scenes; more armies of black-suited Asian villains than any five movies by John Woo; and fewer brains than 20 by Adam Sandler.

Worst of all, though, Besson’s film does nothing to deserve its primary asset: Johansson herself, who starts out interesting, and ends up being merely and boringly superhuman. — Guardian News & Media

Kate Moss parties with Madonna

Model Kate Moss partied with singer Madonna at her 1920s-themed birthday party organised over the weekend. The Frozen hitmaker turned 56 on August 16. Moss joined Madonna in celebrating her birthday at a lavish party at a private villa in the French countryside, where the two were pictured together, reports contactmusic.com. Madonna posted the photo of herself wearing a beaded black dress next to the model, who was clad in a strappy black gown, on her Instagram account Sunday.

Madonna’s children — Lourdes, 17, Rocco, 14, David, 8, and Mercy, 8 — also attended the birthday bash. — IANS

Stallone was up for Ford’s role in Star Wars