Late last week, filmmaker Luc Besson (The Fifth Element, most recently Lucy) joined Twitter to announce that his next film would be, “a big sci-fi,” called Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. He went on to reveal the film’s logo (pictured above) as well as Valerian’s lead actors Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne arranged together in moody, black-and-white shots (included below). Now, coming from Cannes is news that EuropaCorp plans to release Valerian to worldwide audiences on July 21st, 2017.

Starring @danedehaan & @Caradelevingne. Shooting in December. In theaters 2017. pic.twitter.com/R3STb1aPsf

— Luc Besson (@lucbesson) May 12, 2015

Though this latest news doesn’t come from Besson’s impressively sparse Twitter footprint, where he has followed 2 accounts and favorited 5 tweets while writing 4 of his own, it stemmed from the same announcement that revealed Chinese company Fundamental Films plans to invest $50 million in Besson’s upcoming large scale sci-fi project. While Besson has been busy launching The Transporter franchise, launching the Taken franchise, and launching an Arthur and the Invisibles franchise, fans of his work have awaited his return to The Fifth Element-sized sci-fi productions since 1997. Valerian will be an adaptation of the highly popular French graphic novel series created by writer Pierre Christin and artist Jean-Claude Mézières.

In a film like Lucy, Luc Besson’s new existential action flick starring Scarlett Johansson, the stakes are everything. High stakes, forged through effective storytelling, can imbue even the sleepiest action scene with an invaluable sense of urgency, excitement, and suspense. Lucy‘s fatal flaw is that it’s one of only a handful of films where the stakes actually diminish as the film progresses, as the human aspects of the story are abandoned in lieu of big ideas that evoke nothing, emotionally. The film doesn’t even suffice as a dumb-fun action movie; it spends too much time shoving its ideas down your throat, and the “action” scenes are disposable. You’d be better off watching Besson’s much better “super-woman” film, The Fifth Element.

Let’s talk about that (much better) film’s heroine, Leeloo Dallas (multipass), played by Milla Jovovich: She’s a super-skilled, “perfect” warrior, but as the story unfolds, she learns about humanity; she discovers laughter, trust, sacrifice, and love. As she transitions from humanoid to human, we fall for her, because in her journey we see ourselves and our life story. Johansson’s Lucy is the inverse of Leeloo, transforming from a vulnerable, relatable girl to a detached, invulnerable…”it”. We don’t understand “it”. We can’t connect with “it”. We don’t care what happens to “it”, so why should we care about where the film is going? It’s a bridge to nowhere, rendering its revelations and meditations inconsequential.

We meet Lucy in a tight bind; a (soon to be ex) boyfriend has forced her (via sneaky handcuff application) to deliver a mysterious briefcase to a man called Mr. Jang (Min-sik Choi) in a hotel in Taipei, where she’s studying abroad. When she meets Mr. Jang in his hotel room, he’s surrounded by generic-looking thugs, there are dead bodies on the ground, and his suit and face are stained with fresh blood. Besson intercuts Lucy’s predicament with shots of a lion hunting a gazelle, a tired metaphor revisited throughout the film, meant to signify that this story exists on an ultimate, grand stage unstuck from time and space. Terrance Malick did it better in The Tree of Life.

To avoid spoilers, let’s just say Mr. Jang imposes his will on Lucy, and she ends up overdosing on a new, neon-purple drug that allows her to use more than 10% of her brain’s capacity, the ceiling that no human has yet to exceed. (The “10% brain capacity” factoid is utterly erroneous, but this is sci-fi, so it’d be unfair to hold this inaccuracy against the film; scientific absurdity is allowed and welcome.)

Lucy’s condition–in which her brain power gradually increases, granting her supernatural powers like telekinesis, and the ability to control time and matter–is explained at painful length by Morgan Freeman throughout the movie. He plays a professor or scientist of some sort, and whatever mental image of him in that role just popped in your head is exactly what you’ll see in the movie. Morgan Freeman does everything Morgan Freeman does, except one, sorely missed thing. Why do you cast him in a movie? Usually (and Lucy is no exception), it’s to add gravity and credibility to the film. He adds neither of those here, so all his performance amounts to is a Mount Everest of insufferable exposition.

As Lucy’s powers grow, she hemorrhages her humanity, and the film follows suit. As she loses more and more of herself–ascending to a higher existence out in the ether, disposing of every baddie that stands in her way with a flick of a wrist–our reasons to care for her vanish into thin air. She even kills innocent people, for goodness sake.

The film’s trailer promised a pulse-pounding cross between Kill Bill and Carrie, with Lucy displaying myriad feats of superhuman badassery. These showcase sequences under-deliver entirely, with all of them being either a formless mess (a shoehorned car chase, an overwhelmingly ordinary hallway shootout), or a sterile special effects expo (time manipulation and anti-grav shots). To top it all off, the film has one of the most uncomfortable, cold-as-ice movie kisses I’ve ever seen. Besson may please some with Lucy‘s visual fireworks and veneer of profundity, but it’ll leave most feeling empty inside, hungry for an action flick with real bite.

Lucy trailer

Lockout is full of every action movie cliché in the book. The film involves a lot of gunplay and even more scene chewing word play from lead character Snow, played gloriously by veteran Australian actor Guy Pearce. Practically every line that is spewed out of Snow’s mouth is action movie clichéd dialogue. But Pearce is more than up for the challenge.

As far as the film is concerned, you might as well have called Lockout: Escape from Space. The film is essentially an Escape from New York/L.A. rip off. A convict is given a reprieve if he can rescue the president’s daughter from a massive floating prison that orbits the Earth after being overrun by its own prisoners. Other than the location, that is literally the plot of John Carpenter’s early cult classic. As I previously stated the film borrows HEAVILY from tons of other action films, but the actors and filmmakers take none of this seriously and just go for it. The result is a very entertaining action film.

The film begins on Earth with Snow involved in a deadly shootout in an apartment. He escapes only to be pursued viciously by government agents in a chase scene that can only be described as utterly ridiculous. The FX in this scene are extremely poor. What’s really odd is that in later scenes the FX are outstanding. All this leads the viewer to believe that they were done poorly on purpose, maybe to suggest that the filmmakers know how ridiculous their film is. No one knows for sure.

Snow is captured and interrogated about what happened in the apartment. Literally, every single answer Snow gives is a wisecrack smart ass answer, each of them hilarious. Each of them earns him a right hook to the jaw. When I initially saw the preview for Lockout I had a lot of reservations about Pearce playing this kind of role. I’ve been a big supporter of his ever since he burst onto the scene in Christopher Nolan’s mind bending neo classic Memento. But as the film continued my worries began to ease. A friend suggested to me that Pearce would be perfect as Nathan Drake for the upcoming Uncharted movie and he is right. There is probably no other actor more perfectly suited for the role than Pearce.

Everyone remembers Maggie Grace right? No? Really? She’s the cute blonde girl from Lost and was Liam Neeson’s daughter in Taken. Here she plays the unfortunate role of the President of the United States’ daughter, Emilie Warnock. She arrives at the outer space slammer to investigate any wrong doing by the prison warden and his crew. There are rumors of the warden using prisoners as lab rats for some kind of drug. Well wouldn’t you know, a prisoner escapes and lets all of his friends out to play. They kill a few people and take the rest hostage and demand to be released before they kill more. The U.S. government offers Snow a deal. Fly up there and rescue Warnock. Get her to safety and he can considered himself a free man. Easier said than done right?

What follows is an hour and a half of action cliché after action cliché. The film knows all the right notes to hit and the actors are more than ready to play along with them. Lockout isn’t a great film by any means. Hell, you’ve probably seen this film at least 30 times before. You probably already know how it ends and what the final words of the film will be. I wouldn’t dream of telling you to drop everything and run out to see Lockout. But if you find yourself with nothing to watch and you’re looking for a great escape (no pun intended), Lockout is more than up for the challenge of entertaining you for 90 minutes. And when something is done right, isn’t that something worth appreciating?