LUCY

(Luc Besson, 2014)

Besson has always had a knack for establishing a simple, gripping high concept dramatic device quickly and economically. The first 10 minutes of Lucy features two examples of this talent; in the first we watch Lucy (Scarlett Johansson, beautifully cast), plainly a bit of a party girl studying in Taipei, as she argues with a newish boyfriend who is trying to persuade her to drop off a mysterious briefcase in a hotel. Of course this errand leaves the boyfirend dead and Lucy in the hands of a Korean gang run by Mr Jang (Choi Min-Sik) who want to use her as a mule, an experimental new drug surgically concealed inside her stomach ready to be transported to Europe. Secondly there is the scene where a terrified Lucy is forced to open the the briefcase she has delivered while Mr Jang and his men hide behind cover in case it is a bomb.
Besson shoots these scenes simply and classically. Some of the style - we must remember that the "movement" of which Besson along with directors like Jean-Jacques Beineix and Leos Carax belonged was known as the "cinema du look" - which so enveloped his earlier work seems to have dropped away, and though Lucy always looks good, there is nothing all that distinctive or remarkable about its visual style.
Instead - and this is new for Besson - the content is fascinating. The ideas in Lucy about human beings only using 10% of our brains and the possibilities if we ever accessed more may be half-baked sci-fi, but at least there are ideas. And Besson expresses them visually, or at least tries to. His film has passages that recall a lobotomised Tree of Life, others that suggest 2001 and Koyanisqatsi. And yet, sometimes the effect is like nothing so much as an extremely well-shot and cut Powerpoint presentation. And that is without mentioning the dissonance created by juxtaposing all that with the international crime drama (the kind of thing Besson's Production company, EuropaCorp, specialises in) that the first act suggests Lucy will become. It never quite becomes that. Instead, that story - of Lucy's attempts to track down the rest of the drug that has allowed her to access more of her brain and hence given her what are in effect superpowers - runs alongside the changes Lucy is registering within herself and how they are effecting her.
As she begins to transcend time and space the film has one foot bogged down in a familiar, predictably violent action film. While Johansson is excellent - this role suggests a sort of dumber companion to Under the Skin - this strange schizophrenia is both the films strength and its great weakness. It makes for a movie that is entertaining, weirdly self-aware, and utterly brainless.

LOCKOUT

(James Mather, Stephen St. Ledger, 2012)

In this era where the values and techniques of the old b-movie have become the values and techniques of the big blockbuster spectacle, only bigger, in this age when more or less every genre film is a b-movie, actual b-movies have more value. They retain some of the grit, some of the spirit of violence, sex and exploitation b-movies once meant in the face of the relentless money and polish you see on screen in the big studio blockbusters rolled out every summer.
Director Luc Besson has long enjoyed a sideline as a producer of such movies; generally corralling an International star (Jason Statham, Liam Neeson, John Travolta) as a maverick hero, shooting relatively cheaply somewhere in Europe and building around a single simple high concept, all directed by a young European director seasoned in advertising or pop videos, his action factory has produced a series of genre hits which owe a little to his own early work; pacy, visually stylish and slick, narratively simple, they only eliminate the odd poetry always present in Besson's work as director.
Lockout is more of the same. Directed by the Irish duo of Mather and St. Ledger on Serbian locations that all have the look of a disused power station and generic steel-corridor-and-airlock sets that could have come from any of a dozen sci-fi tv shows or movies from the last three decades, it stars Guy Pearce as Snow, an agent framed for murder and espionage who is given a last chance before he spends the rest of his life in "stasis" on an orbiting satellite-cum-prison. That prison is in the hands of the violent inmates (led by a pair of colourful, psychotic Glaswegian brothers, nicely capitalising on that cities uniquely aggressive accent and played with menace and wit by Joseph Gilgun and Vincent Regan) who unknowingly have the presidents daughter (Maggie Grace) as one of a group of hostages. Snow has to get onboard, rescue the daughter, and get off. Along the way he obviously has to clear his name, too, all of this against the clock as the prison drifts towards earth and oblivion.
The premise may be derivative and even hoary - Snow bears a strong resemblance to Korben Dallas, Bruce Willis' hero from Besson's The Fifth Element, and the story has an awful lot of John Carpenter in it's DNA - but the treatment is pacy, funny and grubbily stylish. The script is filled with zingy one-liners which Pearce utters with obvious relish and superbly world-weary timing. At times it reaches a near Shane Black level of fatalistic verbal comedy, even while the rest of the dialogue - the exposition and some clumsy character development - is dull and perfunctory.
The action is mixed; some solidly suspenseful sequences (Snow is appealingly physically vulnerable for a modern action hero) jostle with messily edited fight scenes, all visceral impact and little visual coherence, but Pearce carries it throughout, and the pace never let's you consider its flaws too deeply.
A proper, down and dirty b-movie then, fast, furious, frenetic, and tremendous fun throughout, even if it won't linger long in the mind afterwards.