5) Lucy
Watching Lucy is like sitting through dinner with a blowhard intellectual who just won’t shut up, no matter how much you beg them to. Luc Besson vomits his wackiest, weirdest philosophies up onto the screen, wraps them in two layers of eye candy and then has the nerve to call his film a “thought-provoking thriller.” I’m not sure what makes me more mad – that Besson sucked the life out of lead actress Scarlett Johansson and turned her into a dead-eyed puppet only capable of spouting his metaphysical garbage, or that he so completely squandered a highly promising premise, about a woman whose brain capacity rapidly increases after ingestion of an experimental drug.
Both offenses are inexcusable. Besson piles on the pretentious blather so high it overwhelms everything else in the picture, rendering what little plot there is incomprehensible. As Lucy becomes essentially omniscient, the film loses any stakes or logic it once possessed, and watching it feels like watching a gamer eagerly blast through level after level of a first-person shooter you detest.
If Lucy ever displayed an ounce of the smarts it claims to possess, I’d probably like it. But Besson tries to pull the wool over our eyes, feeding Johansson mountains of vaguely scientific gibberish which he smugly passes off as scientific fact. He didn’t fool me for a second (though, judging by the film’s inexplicable 66% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the director did make asses out of a few critics), and I’m still pissed that he dragged me down his own loopy rabbit hole much further than any sane human would ever want to go. If Lucy had a face, I’d punch it.