Scarlett Johansson's two latest movies are in the sci-fi action-thriller genre, so it is appropriate to review the two side-by-side. And we have a clear winner.
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Contestant No. 1: "LUCY" (Directed by Luc Besson)
Number 1 at the box office on its opening weekend (which was when I saw it), it earned a cool $43.9 million. I am here to tell you not to contribute any more money to this empty, increasingly-ridiculous, pseudo-intellectual nonsense. French director Luc Besson is noted for providing a Gallic flair to the standard Hollywood genre film, usually with strong female characters in the lead. Yet Besson films have always been about style over substance (even in his best work, "The Professional" and "La Femme Nikita," you leave the theater with an empty feeling).
This is not his best work. It starts promisingly enough: ScarJo is a party girl in Taiwan (?) who gets forced to deliver a briefcase by her loser boyfriend (it's okay: he only has one scene). She is dragged into a lush hotel suite that has been recently splattered in blood by the intended recipient of the briefcase (played by a very menacing South Korean actor named Choi Min-Sik). This scene plays out with a deft blend of terror and humor, as she is forced into being a drug mule for a new super-drug that is very cinematically-friendly: it looks like fluorescent blue rock candy--who doesn't want to snort that? In the first of many plot developments that make no sense at all, one of the thugs employed by the drug dealer ruptures the bag of drugs surgically-implanted into her body, allowing it to enter her bloodstream in massive quantities.
Following the tenet "That which doesn't kill her makes her stronger," the drug allows her brain to function at increasingly higher capacity (I learned all this from the deathly dull lecture delivered by God/President/Professor Morgan Freeman which intercuts with (and dilutes) the scene in the hotel room). Then the movie takes off, as ScarJo is able to control people's minds, weaponry, cellphones -- yet she neglects to kill the people who are trying to kill her. Instead, she speed reads all of Dr. Freeman's theories about brain capacity, and pays him a visit in Paris. Then, the movie half-heartedly dips its toes into territory already covered by two better films: "The Matrix" and "Tree of Life." If you are saying to yourself: "Those two movies have nothing in common!", then you have hit on why "Lucy" is such a train wreck of a movie.
Contestant No. 2: "UNDER THE SKIN" (Directed by Jonathan Glazer)
In this uncompromising sci-fi tale, Scarlett Johansson plays the hunter, not the hunted. Unrecognizable in a black wig and British accent (literally un recognizable, since many of the men she picks up on the streets of Glasgow are non-actors filmed with a hidden camera), she is the woman who fell to earth to prey upon men for her home planet's consumption (I got that plot point from the novel, as the film only obliquely references that point of her drawing these men into an icky black pool).
Much of the movie is shot from her point of view, so the harsh landscape and heavy Glaswegian accents, combined with several wordless scenes and a sound design that is more at home in an experitmental film than a feature film (credit to Brit Mica Levi for the imaginative soundtrack), gives the audience feeling that they have entered an alien landscape, too. The director, British Jonathan Glazer, is known to embrace controversy: his previous film, "Birth" (2004) starred a radiant, short-haired Nicole Kidman as a widow who falls in love with a 10-year-old boy (who she thinks is her reincarnated husband). It was a moody/creepy tour de force.
Glazer ups the creepiness level considerably here. We are treated not only to full frontal nudity (male and female), but to a lengthy, wordless scene on a windswept Scottish beach that is shocking in its inhumanity. The shocks keep coming throughout this unsettling film, up to and including its heart-breaking end (when the alien sees what it is like to be human). Major credit to a star of Johansson's stature to take on this challenging, exposing, non-commercial role. As in "Lucy," she is in almost every scene, and she carries each movie like a pro. We have a winner!
