How great is it that we live in an age where the adorable young girl from Ghost World and The Horse Whisperer has matured into this confident, credible ass-beater? It didn’t happen overnight. Scarlett Johansson has been taking names for years now. But we’ve gotten to the point where seeing her doing her best Jason Bourne impersonation in a Luc Besson thriller isn’t shocking. It’s invigorating.
The above trailer, shared via The Playlist, is for Besson’s upcoming Lucy, a hard-hitting thriller that carries this amazing logline:
A drug mule accidentally swallows her cargo and finds she now has superpowers."
Uh, yeah. Sign me up for that movie. Especially since, after detours into more serious genre fare with The Family and The Lady, Lucy looks like a return to action for Besson to his days filming features like La Femme Nikita and Leon: The Professional. And who doesn’t want to see more of that?
From what we can tell in this first trailer, Johansson plays an innocent victim who is surgically injected with a packet of drugs and ordered to deliver them. Along the way, though, she unleashes the "power" of the substances resting inside her, turning her into a lethal weapon. I mean, look at that face!
From there, she is armed:
And very dangerous.
What I’m most impressed by is Johansson’s arrogance in the part of an action star. The way she carries herself through the first trailer for Lucy, you can see the years of training as Black Widow just informing her every decision. As we lament to passing of former action stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger or the greedy Bruce Willis, let’s also celebrate the rise of the female ass kickers like ScarJo. Now give her a Black Widow standalone movie, dammit!
Lucy co-stars Morgan Freeman and Analeigh Tipton. It has a tremendous techno-sci-fi aspect to it that elevates the usual action. Having Freeman present connects it to Transcendence in an odd way. But it will be it’s own standalone film in theaters on August 8, from Universal Studios.
