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Imagine a stranger-in-a-strange-land revenge thriller about a wide-eyed Anglo bombshell ( Scarlett Johansson ) who gets kidnapped and abused in Taiwan by nasty, sweaty, shouting Korean gangsters and then escapes to seek justice. Then imagine this same movie starring, say, a lightning fast kick boxer who can knock a dozen opponents' teeth out before they can raise a single fist. Now imagine this same movie injected with a dose of apocalyptic science fiction, with the woman gaining strange powers as the story unfolds. Then envision midnight-movie touches mixed into the filmmaking: flash cuts of predators and prey enhancing otherwise typical scenes of plans being hatched; monologues about brain capacity and the true meaning of time coupled with psychedelic visions and wormholes and explanatory objects materializing from thin air. 

That's Luc Besson's "Lucy," a thriller about an American woman who gets kidnapped into service as a drug mule bearing an experimental synthetic hormone, accidentally absorbs some of it, then sheds her physical, intellectual and perceptual limitations. I could describe five or six other kinds of movies that in some way also echo "Lucy." Sections may remind you of the original " The Matrix " and the last hour of "Akira," and the final ten minutes play like a Greatest Hits of science-fiction "trip" movies. You've seen a lot of the individual situations and filmmaking techniques in "Lucy" as well. In fact, you'd be hard pressed to identify one idea, scene or element in the picture that is not a cliche.  

But the total package feels fresh. From the minute that Johansson's title character suffers a beating in captivity that ruptures the drugs in her stomach and releases them into her bloodstream (a Yankee nightmare), the film enters a realm of continual delight, though not always surprise. There's no point naming any of the other major characters, as there really are no other characters, only types: the arrogant fat-cat drug dealer ( Choi Min-Sik ) who thinks he can control the short blond drug mule and learns the hard way that he can't; the brilliant, deep-voiced scientist ( Morgan Freeman , who else?) whose theoretical studies of the human brain's untapped potential make him an information source and then finally a kind of partner-savior to Lucy; the handsome nice-guy Parisian cop ( Amr Waked ) who assists Lucy during her climactic mission to acquire more of the experimental hormone to ingest and become whatever it is that she's becoming: a 1950s sci-fi monster, probably—the kind that cannot be killed because everything you shoot at it makes it stronger and hungrier.

Lucy is little more than a type herself—a representative of humanity in its un-mutated, non-super state. Johannson's mid-career transformation from husky-voiced ingenue to intensely physical matinee idol is one of the more fascinating arcs in American cinema. It's only her control over her body, voice and eyes—and maybe our awareness that her performances in this movie, " Her " and " Under the Skin " are all of a piece; Lucy even uses the phrase "under the skin" at one point!—that stops "Lucy" from being tiresome. Her work keeps us from realizing that Besson's script has botched the chance to tell a deeper story, one that's not just bombastically exciting and superficially clever, but quietly tragic.

"Lucy" starts with shots of the prehistoric ape-woman Lucy and periodically returns to her throughout the story, not-too-subtly comparing the heroine's transformation to that of the species itself ("from evolution to revolution," to quote one of the script's more pungent phrases). And yet there are only two moments that make us really understand and empathize with Lucy as something other than a cipher who represents the un-evolved human. One is an early scene of her being terrorized and abused by Taiwanese drug thugs: Lucy's abject helplessness here is hard to watch. The other occurs deeper in the story when Lucy realizes she's about to embark on a terrifying and probably one-way transformative journey and phones her mom. The scene is shot mostly in tight closeup. The dialogue has a goofy Proustian boldness: "I remember the taste of your milk in my mouth ... I want to thank you for a thousand kisses that I can feel on my face." 

That scene is so brazenly powerful that in retrospect it made me wish the main character had gone on a journey with more emotional gradations. Heck, I'd have settled for more than the two that Besson deigns to give us: "Oh, my God, these guys want to kill me" and "I am God, watch me kill these guys." When the hormones enter Lucy's bloodstream it's as if a switch has been flipped. The heroine starts speaking in monotone and tilting her head at looming men like a quizzical bird regarding a worm that it's about to devour. She's woman-as-Terminator. The Terminator is a great movie monster, but there's a reason why it's a supporting character in the films that bear its name.

Like many films by Besson—" The Professional ," " The Fifth Element ," " The Messenger " and other high-octane shoot-'em-ups—"Lucy" starts out riveting but becomes less engaging as it goes along. It keeps introducing potentially rich narrative veins and then failing to tap them. It too often falls back on gunplay and gore just when you think it might finally delve into the notions that it keeps serving up with such fanfare (the falseness of the idea of uniqueness; the self-defeating nature of a species "more concerned with having than being"; time as "the one true unit of measure").  

Nevertheless: "Lucy" is a fun, confident work. It's fast and tight and playful even when it's sadistic and violent, which is often. It lasts about 90 minutes and change but feels longer in a good way, because every second is packed tight. It's full of itself, yet it still keeps winking at you. It wants to be taken seriously, but not so seriously that you don't laugh at (and with) the sight of Lucy strolling into a gunfight wearing nosebleed heels, or making enemies writhe like marionettes on invisible strings. The movie is alive. It pops. 

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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Film credits.

Lucy movie poster

Lucy (2014)

Rated R for strong violence, disturbing images, and sexuality

Scarlett Johansson as Lucy

Morgan Freeman as Professor Norman

Choi Min-Sik as Kang

Analeigh Tipton as Caroline

Amr Waked as Pierre Del Rio

Cinematography

  • Thierry Arbogast

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'Lucy' review: dissecting Scarlett Johansson's perfect brain

In luc besson's latest, the augmented human is so flawless she's boring.

By Molly Osberg on July 24, 2014 09:58 am 118 Comments

lucy movie review quora

Given people’s desire to dump money on all sorts of self-improving pills, superfoods, fitness trackers, and life hacks, it’s no wonder that Hollywood has taken to neuroscience’s most persistent myth — the idea that humans only use one-fifth of their brains. Way back in 1996, John Travolta gained access to the rest of his and learned to levitate things in Phenomenon ; a few years ago Limitless ’ Bradley Cooper took a “smart pill” and used his new brain power to get super-rich playing the stock market. Now, with Lucy , France’s most blockbuster-ready director Luc Besson takes a stab at the 100 percent human.

Besson’s augmented main character, having tapped into her full potential, is oddly inhuman for someone who’s supposed to be her fullest possible self. The titular Lucy, as the film goes on, is able to do amazing things — levitate, for one. But in Besson’s world, using more of your brain makes you increasingly abstract, so the more amazing Lucy’s powers are the less she seems to enjoy them. In trying to reconcile this cool, mechanical version of the brainiest human, the movie grafts together elements of a madcap spy thriller and an oblique, existential riff reminiscent of Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life .

Scarlett Johanssen’s Lucy begins as a pretty, vacant undergraduate bar-hopping her way through a semester in Taipei. As the movie opens, we find her being pressured by a Bono-lookalike she’s been seeing into delivering a package. Obviously, the hand-off is not to go well for Lucy, and she’s shortly being dragged into a black marble hotel room, split open in the "lower tummy" region (the brisk black-market surgeon’s term, not mine), and packed with drugs she’s to deliver abroad.

The drug almost immediately becomes dislodged and leaks into Lucy’s bloodstream, inexplicably turning her brain function up to 11. With access to ever-larger portions of her brain, Lucy can shoot a gun and learn languages instantly. She can read minds and see radio waves, levitate enemies, turn from blonde to brunette, type on two keyboards at once and make computers do things that, no matter your brain capacity, computers will never, ever do. As the movie progresses, a number flashes across the screen every time Lucy gains access to a larger percentage of her brain, basically leveling her up in the big video game of life. And for all of the interest Super Lucy shows in being able to do any of these things, she actually might as well be controlled by a joystick.

She can make computers do things that computers will never, ever do

Besson’s most popular work has almost always featured some form of a femme fatale — the violent, cunning female lead striking a sultry stance before she pulls the trigger and blows your brains out. In Besson’s breakout The Fifth Element , Milla Jovovich’s flame-haired humanoid runs circles around Bruce Willis with a giggle; Nikita ’s thoroughly 1990s version of the cliché has Anne Parillaud mowing down diplomats in a pixie cut. Lucy is built for that mold — she is, quite literally, the only woman in the film, surrounded constantly by goonish and interchangeable groups of cops, scientists, and gangsters (the notable standout being Min-sik Choi, the slickest of mob bosses) all of them immediately bested by her otherworldly smarts and the click of her heels on the sidewalk.

But for some reason, Besson’s version of hyperintelligence lifts its subjects above the basics of the human experience, and by the time she’s at 40 percent Lucy’s emotional capacity is on par with Robbie the Robot. "I don’t feel pain, desire," she tells Morgan Freeman, who plays a brain researcher softy befuddled by her predicament.

But without pain and desire, charm or glory, Lucy makes for a deeply uninteresting lead. When Scarlett Johanssen played an AI she was more human, and if Lucy can’t eke joy out of her superhuman powers, it’s almost impossible for her viewers to. It’s a fact made even more frustrating given Johanssen’s pre-super-drug performance, a genuinely claustrophobic 10 minutes in which the actress’ body seems to physically shrink as she realizes what’s in store for her.

It’s too bad, because the fights are well-choreographed if anticlimactic, and the locations — Berlin and Paris among them — are lovely. At times, the editing can be whiplash-tight, particularly during one extended, clairvoyance-enhanced car chase, and the spare moments of deadpan humor are welcome respites from a film that tries to drop expository knowledge about the meaning of life with a straight face.

When Johanssen played an AI she was more human

Throughout the film, the action is interrupted by long, sweeping shots straight from the Discovery Channel: gazelles, pyramids, tornadoes, dolphins. It invites comparison to Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life , famously interspersed with longer shots of similar material. But where Malick’s intentions are usually fairly straightforward— dude loves the divine beauty of nature, okay? — importing that level of heavy-handed montaging onto a sci-fi film requires you to get your scientific theories straight, or at least have a great character as a foil. Unfortunately, the script is a weird tangle of evolutionary psychology and bootleg transhumanism, falling back on booming pseudo-profundities like "humans are more concerned with having than being" and "we never really die."

Towards the end, Lucy takes a sharp left turn and, unable to make good on earlier foreshadowing, breaks down into a tumble of trippy, jarring — and, yes, sort of beautiful —scenes. It’s heavy and more than a little ridiculous, but at least it’s honest, and better than watching one of the most in-demand actresses on the planet boredly flip dudes upside down, or gaze impassively on as she experiences what should be the Best Trip of All Time. As Lucy herself says, in a flat voice, "Knowledge doesn’t bring chaos — ignorance does." An ignorance-free, chaos-less, post-human world sounds great and all, but unfortunately it doesn’t make a very satisfying action movie.

Lucy opens Friday, July 25th. Images courtesy of Universal Pictures.

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Lucy, film review: Scarlett Johansson will blow your mind in Luc Besson's complex thriller

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Loaded weapon:  drugs have surprise side effects for Scarlett Johansson in Luc Besson's 'Lucy'

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A decade ago, Luc Besson seemed burned out as a film-maker. There was talk of his retirement. The director of Nikita and Léon was reduced to making animated features (the wretched Arthur and the Invisibles) and to overseeing the growth of his company EuropaCorp, a French version of a Hollywood studio that combines sales and distribution with production.

It would be overstating it to suggest that Besson is enjoying a major creative renaissance but Lucy is the best film he has made in a very long time. This is a movie that perfectly illustrates what makes him such a distinctive and infuriating director. Besson combines bravura imagery and ingenious ideas with large dollops of Gallic kitsch and silliness. His attempts at profundity are continually undermined by an infantile desire to throw in slapstick and action sequences for their own sake. What can't be denied is the brilliance of the execution. Lucy, partly shot in Imax, deserves to be seen on the biggest screen possible.

Helped by the cinematographer Thierry Arbogast and by the virtuosity of the special effects technicians at Industrial Light and Magic, the veteran French director has delivered a film that really does induce the same sense of wonder that was found in the silent era in Georges Méliès' fantastical shorts.

The key concept here – promoted relentlessly in the marketing that always accompanies Besson films – is that average humans only use 10 per cent of their brain capacity. In order to demonstrate how somebody would function using the full might of their noggin, Besson devises an incredibly convoluted and complex thriller plot. Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) is an American student living a riotous life in Taipei. Her ex-boyfriend persuades her to deliver a mysterious package to a businessman in an upmarket hotel. This package contains a synthetic drug called CPH4 that has mind-bending and enlarging properties. The businessman, really a gangster, forces Lucy and some other unfortunate Europeans to act as drug mules. She has a pouch of the stuff inserted in her guts. When this pouch bursts, she suddenly develops superhuman mental powers.

Having played an alien in Under the Skin and voiced a computer operating system in Her, Johansson is developing a reputation as an utterly fearless actress. She is ready to take roles that more timid Hollywood stars would recoil from instinctively. Lucy allows her to combine two sides of her screen persona: the oddball visionary and the action heroine familiar from Avengers Assemble. Johansson always keeps her poise. She also has an ironic detachment, as if she is at a slight remove from her character. Whether she is instructing a doctor how to remove drugs from her abdomen or using her telepathic powers to make her gun-toting gangster adversaries stick to the ceiling, she is strictly matter of fact in her manner. She helps anchor a film that might otherwise have seemed preposterous.

There are scenes in Lucy which are strangely moving, in which Besson briefly moves away from his kinetic, comic book-style storytelling. We hear the heroine reminiscing about moments in her earliest childhood that she could not possibly remember without the CPH4. As her powers increase, so does the inevitability of her demise – or, at least, that of her body. She can perceive things that she would rather ignore, ranging from her mortality to the potential health problems that her flatmate faces unless she changes her lifestyle.

Between the action scenes, there are also time-outs for philosophising about the nature of time, matter and perception. Lucy's sounding board is Professor Samuel Norman (Morgan Freeman), an academic whose area of research is precisely the untapped possibilities of the human mind. Freeman plays the role in just the way you would expect – with a solemn and dignified gravitas.

Lucy: Film stills

Besson borrows ideas and motifs from countless other films, including some of his own. The scene in which Lucy pinions a gangster boss to his chair by sticking blades through his hands owes an obvious debt to the extreme Asian thrillers made by Takashi Miike or Park Chan-wook. The more lyrical, metaphysical moments can't help but invoke memories of Terrence Malick movies such as The Tree of Life. Then, there are the outrageously silly sequences – most notably, a car chase through Paris in which Lucy drives like a maniac – that are in the spirit of Besson's own earlier films.

There is a sense that the screenplay is a puzzle that Besson himself has only partly worked out. He hasn't managed to introduce any meaningful romantic sub-plot. It is clear that the hard-bitten Paris cop chief (played by Egyptian actor Amr Waked) is besotted with Lucy. However, she is so far ahead of him intellectually, and he is so busy keeping Korean gangsters at bay, that there is no time for them to make anything other than the most cursory small talk.

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Lucy may not make sense but it is refreshing to see Besson working at full throttle. The film has an energy and visual inventiveness that was almost entirely lacking in his last feature as a director, The Family, a lazy comedy-thriller in which an ageing mob boss (played by Robert De Niro) hides out in provincial France.

A French director tilting at an international audience, Besson himself often appears to be caught between different cultures and film-making styles. That confusion is reflected in Lucy but is part of the film's richness. From his thriller Nikita (1990) early in his career to The Lady (2011), his biopic of Burmese political leader Aung San Suu Kyi, Besson has often made films about strong and defiant female characters. Lucy may be confused and eccentric but it is stylish, provocative film-making. As an action movie with ideas, it is also a welcome antidote to the mindless, testosterone-driven fare – such as The Expendables – that has been clogging up screens this summer.

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  • REVIEW: I Love <i>Lucy</i> — and Luc, and Scarlett

REVIEW: I Love Lucy — and Luc, and Scarlett

Film Title: Lucy

Correction appended, July 29, 2014

It’s a fallacy, long rebuffed by science, that humans use only about 10% of their brainpower . But it is true about most summer movies. Pouring their wizardry into special effects and well-choreographed fights, warm-weather action films rarely challenge the viewer with grand notions or beautifully baffling imagery. Viewers who invest two hours in a superhero movie often leave feeling entertained but somehow dumber.

Luc Besson’s Lucy is here to the rescue. The French writer-director-producer’s new movie, about a woman empowered and imperiled by the explosion of a powerful new drug in her nervous system, kicks ass and takes brains. Besson creates a heroine whose rapidly expanding abilities make her the world’s most awesome weapon. In the process, he promotes Scarlett Johansson from an indie-film icon and Marvel-universe sidekick to the movie superwoman she was destined to be. Taking place in less than a day — and synopsizing 3 million years of human evolution in a hurtling 82 min. of screen time — Lucy tops its only competition, Tom Cruise and Doug Liman’s underappreciated Edge of Tomorrow , as the summer’s coolest, juiciest, smartest action movie.

(READ: Corliss’s review of Edge of Tomorrow )

The cleverness in Besson’s film isn’t in its pseudoscience premise — that Johansson’s Lucy is transformed from a clueless American grad student to a genius and martial arts adept as her brain-use percentage skyrockets from 10% to 100%. No, it’s in showing that from great power can come both genetic transformation and personal tragedy. While Marvel heroes live on in countless remakes and reboots, Lucy may not survive the toxic drug that makes her unique. But it does give her a glimpse of the big cosmic picture. “Life was given to us a billion years ago,” she says in a voice-over at the film’s beginning. “What have we done with it?” By the end, she’ll show you.

Rated R for its dollops of violence, this female-glorifying picture not only shames all PG-13-rated summer spectacles for their wimpitude but also lures the audience into accompanying it on a third-act trip of ambitious movie madness. It begins with a vision of the first known hominid, the 3 million-year-old female discovered in Ethiopia in 1974 and nicknamed Lucy, then bombards you with allusive montages (say, of various species copulating) and the intricate drizzle of computer algorithms, and ultimately spirals into transcendent, Kubrickian speculation, all while satisfying the basic movie appetite for twists and thrills.

(FIND: 2001: A Space Odyssey on the updated all-TIME 100 Movies list )

In Taipei, Lucy’s scuzzy friend Richard (Pilou Asbaek) saddles her with a locked briefcase to be delivered to the mysterious Mr. Jang (Choi Min-sik, the Korean star of Oldboy and I Saw the Devil ). In a hotel lobby, Richard is shot dead, while five Asian heavyweights strong-arm Lucy up to Jang’s corpse-littered suite. Rinsing the blood from a few recent murders off his hands, Jang orders her to open the briefcase. It contains four packets of a blue powder, called CPH4; it is, as Jang’s English-speaking aide (Julian Rhind-Tutt) notes, “a drug the kids in Europe are gonna enjoy.”

Lucy is sedated and wakes up with an abdomen scar; her belly has been sliced open to contain one of the four packets. She and three other unfortunates will be muling the drug to European capitals, spurring addiction, death and chaos … unless — there’s always an unless — Lucy can harness her gigabyte brain waves in the few hours she is told she has left to live.

(READ: Did Oldboy inspire the Virginia Tech shootings? )

A sadistic prison guard’s kick to Lucy’s stomach triggers the effects of the CPH4. With her brain power now at 20% (the rising numbers are flashed onscreen like intermittent basketball scores), she overpowers the guard, kills him and takes his gun, walks into the prison kitchen, kills the four guys there, steals one of their jackets to cover the blood stain on her shirt, goes outside, shoots a cabbie who doesn’t quickly enough hop to her request for a ride, takes another cab to the hospital, where she strides into an operating room and, to persuade the doctors of their need for speed in her case, shoots the patient on the surgical table. (A quick scan of the patient’s X-rays tells her he wasn’t going to live anyway.) All this, which would be a long set piece in any other movie, takes about 4 min. Besson is in as much of a hurry as Lucy is.

In a Paris lecture hall, Professor Samuel Norman (Morgan Freeman) is spouting the 10% theory: that full use of our mental capacity can allow the earth’s creatures “to go from evolution to revolution.” (He must have just seen Dawn of the Planet of the Apes .) Norman also teaches that humans seek to continue the species either by reproduction or immortality. Lucy had the second option thrust upon her. Before flying to Paris for urgent consultation with Norman, she visits Jang, pinioning his hands to his chair arms with two knife blades and calmly explaining, “Learning is always a painful process.” It is for her: on the plane from Taipei, her cells start breaking up, flying around her. The perfect machine she’s become may be disintegrating.

(READ: The genius chimps in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes )

She spends the rest of the movie in Paris, battling a couple dozen of Jang’s thugs and trying to cope with or accept her potent, poignant new condition. At first delighted by her burgeoning skills and acuity, she soon realizes, by Googling the available literature at supercomputer swiftness, that she can’t control her new power — that “all things human are fading away.” She could be Dr. Jekyll turned into a destructive, nearly indestructible Mr. Hyde; or the scientist, played by Jeff Goldblum in David Cronenberg’s 1986 The Fly , who tries to understand his unique metamorphosis even as he succumbs to it. Similarly, superwoman Lucy wants to hold on to her humanity. In Paris, she abruptly kisses the detective (Amr Waked) assigned to her. “Why’d you do that?” he asks, and she replies, “A reminder” — of what human emotion feels like.

(FIND: The Fly on the all-TIME Top 25 Horror Movies list )

Once in a while, Lucy indulges in the inane conventions of summer action films. How is it that, in Taipei, Lucy can read Jang’s mind (to discover the identities and itineraries of the drug mules sent to Berlin, Rome and Paris), yet on a Paris street she doesn’t notice that her nemesis is 10 feet away? Because it’s a movie! And why, when she’s in a rush to meet the professor, does she insist on driving the wrong way on a one-way highway? Because it’s a Luc Besson movie; most of the films he’s produced, including the Taxi , Transporter and Taken franchises, are full of car chases and crashes.

Another of the Frenchman’s fancies: making action pictures about women. In La Femme Nikita , Anne Parillaud is trained as an assassin. In The Professional , 12-year-old Natalie Portman helped hit man Jean Reno fulfill a contract. The Fifth Element , the filmmaker’s biggest Stateside hit, paired taxi driver Bruce Willis with the galaxy’s most ideal specimen, or speciwoman, Milla Jovovich. He also directed biopics of history’s favorite insurgent heroines, Joan of Arc ( The Messenger ) and Aung San Suu Kyi ( The Lady ). Besson must figure that a gender comprising more than half the world’s human population deserves to be represented playing at least 10% of the lead characters in action films. It’d be fine with me if Hollywood followed Besson’s lead and upped the ratio to Lucy level.

(READ: Michelle Yeoh plays Aung San Suu Kyi in Luc Besson’s The Lady )

In a role originally proposed to Angelina Jolie, Johansson grows from grad-student tearfulness to appropriate a good deal of Jolie’s glowering majesty, and to show all appropriate stages along the way. In the recent British film Under the Skin , Johansson played an alien creature that soullessly seduces human males and harvests their meat. And in Spike Jonze’s her she was the more-human-than-human voice of Joaquin Phoenix’s operating system. Besson’s film restores Johansson’s humanity even as it may slip away from Lucy. The longest single shot is of a phone call Lucy makes from Taipei to her kindly, concerned mother (Laura D’Arista) back in the States. Tears flow from the actress’s right eye, as if Lucy is being drained of all the emotion she has felt and will ever feel, and is weeping for the loss.

(READ: Corliss on Scarlett Johansson in Under the Skin )

But don’t weep for Lucy. Just keep track of her strange attributes: the sprouting of extra hands and gooey tentacles. Wonder at her lightning travels across space (she stands in Times Square as humanity zooms around her at a Koyaanisqatsi tempo) and time (when the oldest Lucy and the newest touch fingers in a Sistine Chapel–ceiling moment). And be appreciative that, toward the end of a summer with a lot of meh action epics, one film has shown how the genre can accommodate a crazy-great movie. Thank you, Scarlett, Luc and Lucy .

Correction: The original version of this story misstated the name of Morgan Freeman’s character. It is Samuel Norman. The story also misspelled Milla Jovovich’s name.

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‘Lucy’ Review: Scarlett Johansson Grows Smarter As the Movie Gets Dumber

More full-tilt-boogie Euro-schlock grindhouse existentialism from Luc Besson, featuring a droning, brain-powered superhero that Morgan Freeman tries his darnedest to explain

lucy movie review quora

Why are the latest movies about super-intelligence so ultra-dopey? Audiences this year have already been subjected to “Transcendence,” in which Johnny Depp basically eats the internet, and now we’ve got “Lucy,” starring Scarlett Johansson as an unwitting mule whose ingestion of mass quantities of a new club drug pushes her past the limit of the usual 10% of brain power that humans supposedly use.

“Lucy” doesn’t make a lick more sense than “Transcendence” did — even though both feature Morgan Freeman working overtime to talk us through the proceedings — but at least “Lucy” has the good fortune to be written and directed by Luc Besson , which means that while the results may be cuckoo-bananas, they’re never boring.

See video: Scarlett Johansson Accidentally Accesses 100 Percent of Her Brain Power in First ‘Lucy’ Trailer

Lucy ( Scarlett Johansson ) is a freewheeling expat American in Taiwan, blowing off her studies for nightclub carousing, until the day her boyfriend handcuffs a briefcase to her arm and sends her to see fearsome mobster Mr. Jang (Min-sik Choi, star of the original “Oldboy” ). In a hilariously tense sequence (involving barked orders that have to be translated by a voice on the speaker-phone), Lucy discovers that the case is full of blue drug crystals (not unlike the Heisenberg mix on “Breaking Bad”).

Not long after, she wakes up with a bandage around her midriff and learns that a bag of the stuff has been hidden in her lower intestine. Before she can reach her destination, a flunky of Jang’s kicks her in the gut, releasing the blue stuff into her system.

5703_D034_03726_RV2_CROP.jpg_cmyk

Besson then throws various ticking clocks at us: Lucy has to capture the drugs from the other three mules, with the help of a French narcotics officer named, seriously, Pierre Del Rio ( Amr Waked ); Lucy has to hook up with legendary brain-guy scientist Professor Norman (Freeman) before her physical form shuts down entirely; and of course, Mr. Jang is in hot pursuit, although he and his thugs become less and less interesting as the story goes along.

We’re dealing with a lead character, after all, who slips the shackles of time and space to perceive everything that has ever been. Once your heroine has become one with the universe, it’s hard to get worked up over a dude with a gun, even if it’s Oldboy.

Also read: Scarlett Johansson in First Action-Starring Role ‘Lucy’ Is Poised to Kick Box-Office Butt

Freeman, as is his wont, does a lot of explaining; he’s not a character so much as the narrator of the audiobook of your stereo instructions, telling an audience (and, subsequently, us) how the brain works, what it does and doesn’t do, and why dolphins have amazing abilities based on their usage of 20% of their brains.

As for what’s going on in Luc Besson ‘s brain, it’s anyone’s guess. He makes movies crammed with ridiculous situations, absurd action, and dialogue that frequently sounds like it was written in English, translated to his native French, and then translated back into English. Besson’s movies are never dull, though, and that alone makes his loony flights of fancy and pretentious stabs at deeper meaning between the shoot-outs tolerable.

Also read: Universal Moves Scarlett Johansson’s ‘Lucy’ Up Against ‘Hercules,’ Cameron Diaz’ ‘Sex Tape’

Still, if you’re expecting Black Widow-style fight choreography for Johansson, think again: After a few early gun battles and mano-à-mano moments, she pretty much Obi-Wans her enemies into submission. Add her increasingly droning speech as her brainpower increases, and the performance becomes more and more puzzling, stripping away everything that makes her such a magnetic screen presence. If you want to see an otherworldly Johansson struggling with her bizarre powers, you’re better off renting “Under the Skin.”

(To be fair, this will probably be the only movie where you’ll ever see the actress stare glassily as she rapid-fire types up a storm on two side-by-side laptops.)

“Lucy” is a confounding experience, but at a brisk 85 or so minutes, it manages not to outstay its welcome. Those not enamored of Besson’s particular brand of Euro-schlock grindhouse existentialism, however, may find their brains more stimulated elsewhere.

clock This article was published more than  9 years ago

‘Lucy’ movie review: Scarlett Johansson’s powerful mind, unlocked and ready to kill

lucy movie review quora

An earlier version of this review incorrectly identified a character as a Tokyo crime boss. The character of Mr. Jang, played by South Korean actor Choi Min-Sik, operates out of Taipei, Taiwan. This version has been corrected.

The theme of " Lucy " may be the potential of the human mind, but the less time any human spends thinking about its largely nonsensical plot, the better. The slickly executed bullet-riddler about brainpower can only be enjoyed by cutting off all attempts at logic and rational thought.

Director Luc Besson — the French filmmaker who placed female stars at the center of such action movies as " La Femme Nikita ," " The Professional " and " The Fifth Element " — recruits Scarlett Johansson to serve as his one-woman army here. She plays Lucy, an American in Taipei who gets thrust into the role of drug mule during a nail-biting opening sequence that generates a tension the rest of the film never matches.

After delivering a silver briefcase to a local crime boss and begging for her life, Lucy discovers that the case contains a powdered version of the chemical CPH4, a substance that, with its bright blue hues, calls to mind Walter White’s crystal meth in “Breaking Bad.” Soon after, Lucy and a few other men wind up with bags of CPH4 surgically embedded in their intestines, destined for transport to multiple European countries. But before Lucy arrives at her destination, the substance begins to leak into her bloodstream, activating a rapidly increasing percentage of her brain. This transforms her into an increasingly unstoppable superwoman, for reasons that defy the basic principles of science as well as science fiction.

This is yet another of those movies premised on the "fact" that normal people use only 10 percent of their brain, a supposition that scientists already debunked when the 2011 thriller " Limitless " constructed its narrative around the same premise. Nevertheless, Besson tries to sell the same bill of goods here. He does it, in part, by relying on the most authoritative cinematic tool known to Hollywood: Morgan Freeman.

As Professor Norman, Freeman delivers a lecture to a room of Paris intellectuals in which he explains what men and women could achieve if only they could light up every corner of the cerebellum. Besson cuts between scenes of Freeman discussing that hypothetical and Johansson acting on it, as her mind overloads with memories and information that somehow also turn her into an assassin capable of engaging in hyper-violent versions of Jedi mind tricks.

In those moments, Freeman and Johansson act like a tag team tasked with persuading the audience to believe in the ridiculous; he delivers the verbal, while Johansson — all firing synapses and blazing guns — provides the visual aids. Why, exactly, does the increasing stimulation of underused brain cells turn Johansson into someone who can read other people's thoughts, control telecommunication devices and turn her hair from blonde to jet-black? Look, I don't know, but Morgan Freeman thinks it's possible. The guy who narrates the Science Channel show " Through the Wormhole " must know what he's talking about, right?

As Lucy, Johansson hopscotches between vulnerability and a robotic commitment to execute whatever her sophisticated, internal data processor tells her to do. Her performance is just grounded enough to keep Besson’s occasionally inventive, sometimes silly visual flourishes — including an overreliance on random footage seemingly pulled from nature documentaries — from turning the movie into self-parody.

Besson clearly understands that the film’s central myth endures because people are intrigued by the prospect of activating our whole heads. He runs with that idea full-tilt and at top speed, even if it means turning Lucy into a walking X-ray machine/broadcast network/telekinetic demigod. It’s possible to be swept away by the fun in all that, but only if you’re capable of silencing the messages bubbling through your own gray matter and ignoring the inevitable questions. Like this one: If Johansson’s Lucy has such command of her mental faculties that she is, essentially, the most enlightened being on the planet, shouldn’t she be able to figure out how to get what she wants without causing so much destruction and loss of life?

Not in this cinematic world, where the more you know, the more equipped you are to kill.

Chaney is a freelance writer.

R. At area theaters. Contains strong violence, disturbing images and sexuality. 89 minutes.

lucy movie review quora

Lucy

Review by Brian Eggert July 26, 2014

Lucy

A film dependent on the myth that we use only 10 percent of our brain, and further driven by the notion of unlocking 100 percent of the brain’s potential, Lucy , by writer-director Luc Besson, taps into the possibilities more than Limitless , another story about the same subject, but succeeds only in delivering an emotionless action-thriller that wants to be smarter than it is. In the 1990s, Besson made some great action yarns with The Professional and The Fifth Element , though in recent years, he’s preferred to grandfather the next generation of action directors like Pierre Morel ( Taken ) and Olivier Megaton ( Colombiana ) by producing and often providing the scripts to profitable shoot-em-ups. With Lucy, he returns to the director’s chair for the kind of story to which he’s most attributed. And rather than blowing audiences away, he’s made a confounding picture that either explores his central idea too much or not enough; either way, it’s an unsatisfying disappointment.

Neither a convincing conflict nor well-developed characters inhabit Besson’s script, about an American tourist of average intelligence who, while in Taiwan, is kidnapped by a crime lord and forced to become a drug mule. Scarlett Johansson’s titular heroine finds herself under the gun of Jang (Choi Min-sik, from the original Oldboy ), an imposing baddie who orders a pouch of an experimental drug called CPH4 sewn into her stomach, and into those of three other unwilling mules. After she’s transported into a shoddy cell, she receives a beating that unseals the pouch and sends the mystery drug coursing through her blood stream, electrifying her synapses in extraordinary shades of blue. As this goes on, Besson cross-cuts to a lecture by Samuel Norman (Morgan Freeman), an academic who speculates that things would get pretty out-there—telepathic control over matter, space, and time—should human beings ever gain control over 100 percent of their brain, which is exactly what happens to Lucy. The playful editing by Julien Rey also cross-cuts to nature scenes, such as a cheetah hunting a gazelle, to create a parallel between humans and animals, and demonstrate how far beyond basic primal human instincts Lucy will become.

The best scenes of Lucy occur early on, when there’s still some fragment of humanity left in Johansson’s performance, and her character is using 20 or 30 percent of her brain’s potential (Besson keeps track with a counter that flashes onscreen periodically). Lucy develops the ability to learn and perceive things we cannot imagine, and this transforms her into an unstoppable adversary for Jang’s band of thugs. These scenes where Lucy can out-fight and telekinetically outmaneuver gangsters remind us of Milla Jovovich running circles around alien goons in The Fifth Element . But before long, Lucy’s mental capacities increase and she quickly becomes aware that emotions are elementary functions and only hold us back from exploring our real potential. Here’s where the film begins to slow and we gradually lose any investment. It’s difficult to have sympathy for an already poorly drawn character who, now omnipotent, has no emotions and can do virtually anything she puts her mind to. It may have been more entertaining to preserve the early stage in Lucy’s development and wait until closer to the climax to unlock her full, emotionless potential.

The comparison to The Fifth Element is apt, as both films involve a supreme being who thwarts bad guys. What made The Fifth Element so engaging is that it wasn’t told from the supreme being’s perspective; rather, from that of her lovelorn protector (Bruce Willis). Besson introduces a similar role in Lucy with a Parisian cop Del Rio (Amr Waked), who serves as Lucy’s sidekick and whose scenes feel abridged. At one point, she kisses him as “a reminder” of her humanity; however, the moment feels like a forced attempt to emotionally invest the audience. At any rate, when Lucy begins reading minds and putting whole rooms of baddies to sleep with the wave of her hand, the cop becomes superfluous, and any attempt by Jang’s crew to stop her is devoid of tension when all it takes is a mere thought to defeat them. Meanwhile, Johansson’s character has more in common with her voiced OS in Her , who achieves transcendence through vast knowledge, while her emotionless performance echoes early scenes in Under the Skin , except without the inevitable dramatic payoff.

In the end, Besson’s script is involved in shoddy science propelled by the myth that we only use 10 percent of our brain. (Using EEGs, magnetoencephalographs, MRIs, and PET scans, neuroscientists have found no such dormant areas waiting to be uncovered. But who’s checking?) The myth was first proposed in a 1936 self-help book and has no basis in scientific fact, but still, the myth persists because, well, that’s what myths do. Nevertheless, Besson isn’t concerned with science and would rather enter the furthest reaches of exploratory metaphysics through imagery likened to The Matrix and The Tree of Life , where Lucy sees the world as endless streams of neurons and instantly taps into the vast reaches of space and time. It’s a fun idea, but Lucy never quite pays off in Besson’s usual popcorn-munching no-brainer terms, nor does he succeed in elevating the material to its highbrow possibilities. Indeed, Besson packs a lot of ideas into the brief 89-minute runtime, but he should’ve spent another 20 minutes on character development. And, to get as arbitrarily mathematical as his film, he’s only making use of about 65 percent of his concept’s potential.

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Lucy Reviews

lucy movie review quora

Perhaps the intellectual side of the film arrives a little too late after so much action and does not withstand analysis, but it is enough to elevate a genre film born from an enormous What If... [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | May 9, 2023

lucy movie review quora

It's basically a fantasy wrapped in the guise of science and used as an excuse for an action thriller, but what a thriller. This is a kinetic explosion at its best with Johansson striding through it with a sense of drive and assuredness...

Full Review | May 6, 2023

lucy movie review quora

Lucy‘s two strands co-exist, intercut but separate; the pleasure is in ricocheting between two incompatible elements for an entire movie, making those blunt opening juxtapositions surprisingly indicative of what’s to come.

Full Review | Jan 24, 2023

lucy movie review quora

Besson packs a lot of ideas into the brief 89-minute runtime, but he should've spent another 20 minutes on character development.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 5, 2022

Scarlett Johansson rides a kinetic rush of evolutionary sci-fi and brutal action...

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | May 26, 2021

lucy movie review quora

That's right, this is an action film with a higher purpose. It even comes with its own Terrence-Malick-by-way-of-Stanley-Kubrick tribute.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 1, 2021

lucy movie review quora

Delves so far into scientific theories and philosophies that it rapidly becomes incomprehensible and downright existentially nonsensical.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/10 | Dec 4, 2020

lucy movie review quora

The biggest down side for this movie was the huge absence of action sequences.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Nov 20, 2020

lucy movie review quora

An immensely entertaining and satisfying film that thrives on the strength of Besson's visual style and Johansson's intelligent and emotionally honest performance.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4.0 | Sep 15, 2020

lucy movie review quora

While Besson has made a film that looks good and does provide some amount of entertainment, he populated it with a character that sorely lacks a pulse.

Full Review | Original Score: C+ | Jul 20, 2020

lucy movie review quora

There will be those who laud this as the most fun movie of the summer, while others will condemn it as complete and utter nonsense, and somehow they'll both be right.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Jul 7, 2020

lucy movie review quora

It's silly, it's fun.

Full Review | May 26, 2020

lucy movie review quora

It's like it's the prequel to "Her."

Full Review | Original Score: 5.5/10 | Mar 26, 2020

A fast and loose action movie hellbent on getting in your face and staying on your mind by any means necessary.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Feb 28, 2020

lucy movie review quora

The whole endeavor feels like a half-baked idea carelessly patched together.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/5 | Aug 30, 2019

lucy movie review quora

It is confidently dumb, defiantly moronic and a fine way to spend 90 minutes of time before doing something of value.

Full Review | Original Score: C+ | Jul 30, 2019

lucy movie review quora

I know what you're thinking, but this is no Limitless (Bradley Cooper). As the cells multiply and Lucy taps into more and more of her brain, it's new thrills-new skills with each passing hour.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Apr 17, 2019

lucy movie review quora

Apparently believing the film to be an equally eloquent statement on mankind's past, purpose, and future. It isn't, but with about 50 percent less pretension, LUCY could have been a fun guilty pleasure.

Full Review | Original Score: 2 | Apr 5, 2019

lucy movie review quora

This undeniably silly, but raucously entertaining, off-the-wall transhumanist actioner is an absolute riot.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 3, 2019

lucy movie review quora

Lucy is not a game-changing science fiction movie. Still, it represents the return of Luc Besson to his baroque and risky approach to genre filmmaking. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Mar 26, 2019

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Luc Besson's Surprisingly Metaphysical "Lucy"

lucy movie review quora

By Richard Brody

Image associated to article

The early trailer for Luc Besson’s new film, “Lucy,” promised giddy digital wizardry , and the movie delivers, in a way that surprised me. I saw that it would have a pulp-fiction setup (though I couldn’t foresee the gore). I knew that it would involve Scarlett Johansson displaying supernatural powers. I had no idea that it would borrow metaphysical themes, imagery, and even ideas from the films of Terrence Malick. Besson, who wrote the script and directed, makes use of a keen science-fiction setup that could be lifted from a scrappy and hectic nineteen-fifties drive-in classic. He reaches speculative heights that are fascinating to ponder, thrilling to watch onscreen, and silly to throw away on a rickety story with clumsily pumped-up excitement and emptied-out implications.

Johansson—happily and sassily back on Earth and out of her eerie-astral mode—plays the title role. She’s an American student in Taipei whose boyfriend ropes her into a scheme that lands her in the hands of crime lords. They turn her into an involuntary mule, with pouches of an exotic new drug sewn into her stomach. When the pouches rupture, the instant overdose doesn’t kill her; it sends her into a particular sort of overdrive.

That’s where the ingeniously faux science comes in. Morgan Freeman plays Dr. Samuel Norman, a neuroscientist with an audacious theory based on the commonplace fictional fact that human beings use only a small percentage of their brains. The professor speculates—based on the keen perceptual abilities of dolphins—that, were we able to tap into a higher percentage, the results wouldn’t merely be an increase in intellectual power but new forms of perception and agency that would seem, by our current standards, extrasensory.

The theory is put to the test when Lucy gets hyperdrugged. The substance increases her percentage of cerebral access, and she becomes what students dream of being: a memorious speed-reader, an instant language-learner, and a super-accelerated stereo-typist (with both hands blazing separately on the keyboards of two laptops). Then things get weird: Professor Norman’s theories turn out to be right, and Lucy is able to perceive such things, she says (and I quote Lucy loosely), as the stuff of her own metabolism, the blood in her veins, every memory (including those dredged up from infancy), the force of gravity, the spinning of the globe.

I confess: this notion, which Besson conjures solely through the power of the word, is a scenaristic stroke of cinema. It suffices for Lucy to claim such knowledge—and then, to speak by phone to her mother about some primal experiences from infancy—for it to seem real. It’s at such moments (and there aren’t many) that a vestige of Besson’s own primordial and perhaps unconscious cinematic heritage, the modern French cinema of talk, comes to the fore.

Besson also contrives clever visual correlates for Lucy’s heightened perceptions, showing, from her point of view, something like colorful strings of energy arising from people in the street, which, taken together, become curtains of energy that—though lining the city—she can summon to arm’s length and manipulate manually like a touch screen, prying apart with two fingers a string from which she can access streams of linguistic and symbolic data.

By then, Lucy’s amped-up physical and quasi-metaphysical powers have also kicked in. She finds that she can exert electromagnetic power from afar, and then, eventually, do even more. Lucy is also interested in chasing down the criminals who put her into this predicament, and she heads to Paris both to consult the professor and join forces with a French police officer to prevent a drug-mob massacre. To do this, of course, she harnesses these new powers. (Some neat effects involve action at a close distance—pinning assailants to the ceiling, emptying the cartridge of an attacker’s gun before he can shoot her, creating force fields that her pursuers slam up against.)

But Besson saves the best for the extremes of micro- and macro-experience. He looks to the molecular with visions of globules dividing and hysterical-impressionistic, multicolored riots of vascular and neural overexcitement.  The grand-scale part comes when Lucy’s control of ambient energy taps into the mainframe of existence, the core of space and time. The trailer shows some wondrous stop-motion effects in Times Square and Lucy’s power to swipe action in and out, from high-speed to frozen and back, with her hand, as if swiping along a smartphone or tablet screen. Besson takes this idea audaciously, exhilaratingly far. I won’t spoil the contemplative delight, except to say that he comes amazingly close to territory covered in the more visionary moments of Malick’s “The Tree of Life.” Even now, I can hardly believe what I saw in “Lucy.”

Yet Malick’s movie—with its authentically profound considerations of the links between experience and transcendence, between ordinary life and intuitions of the absolute, between scientific knowledge and religious ecstasy—has an aesthetic, a style, a tone, a mood, which cohere with its grand ideas. His scenes of family drama in Texas, featuring such actors as Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain, are filmed as distinctively and with as original and imaginative a vision as his synthetic images of the beyond, and the substance of that drama (down to the role of music in it, which meshes with the music heard on the soundtrack) is integral to his cinematic-philosophical creation.

Besson, by contrast, films the action with energy and flair but little originality. He realizes his characters with virtually no tendrils of identity to link up to his grander conceit. The emptily throbbing music, by Eric Serra, is placed on the soundtrack no differently from the way that similarly generic action music is employed in “Transformers,” “Edge of Tomorrow,” or other, lesser violent thrillers.

And, no, it isn’t the violence that’s a problem. It often seems that the cinema divides, like culture at large, into two worlds—one based on visions of peace and harmony, the other based on energy and violence—the cinema of “Boyhood” and the cinema of “Transformers,” for instance. (Of course, Malick himself, whose movies of exalted aesthetic confection are also rooted in a tragic vision of violence, proves that the dichotomy is artistically bankrupt.) It would be easy to deride Besson for seeming to co-opt the intellectual basis of Malick’s transcendent cinematic world in order to trick up a banal and conventional crime story with conventional sympathies and conventional cinematic pleasures of bloody mayhem.

But even that idea, in principle, could be a good one. Why not, according to the strange and subterranean circuits of history, conjure vast metaphysical consequences from the sort of seamy story that might make for a few lines in a newspaper’s crime blotter? That’s an idea as true to history as it is rooted in cinematic and artistic history. But Besson’s film doesn’t display the documentary sensibility, the practical curiosity, that this would entail. There’s no problem with the movie’s pulp-fiction essence; the problem is that almost all of Besson’s formidable imagination went into the science-fiction concept and the magnificent computer-graphic realization of it, and very little of that brain power went into the ordinary framework. It’s only through the exercise of observation and the application of invention that the ordinary becomes, in itself, extraordinary. Here, Besson merely adorns the implacable ordinary with elements of the extraordinary. It’s the difference between a movie that offers casual delight (as “Lucy” does) and one that goes into the wonder.

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Her Again

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‘lucy’: film review.

Scarlett Johansson plays a woman whose freshly unleashed brain gives her superpowers.

By THR Staff

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A fantasy about unlocking 100 percent of the brain’s potential that expects viewers to be using just 2 or 3 percent of their own gray matter, Luc Besson ‘s Lucy plays more like a big dumb superhero flick than sci-fi: The powers Scarlett Johansson gains when given full access to her brain quickly outstrip anything one can imagine 3 pounds of skull-bound neurons and synapses being able to do.

Besson’s script offers neither the well-drawn character dynamics nor the clear motivations of a decent comic book origin story, and as it is quickly clear that no baddie has much chance of stopping Lucy, action sequences carry little weight. A top-shelf cast and the (fading) memory of Besson’s action hits will help the picture at the box office, but word of mouth is unlikely to keep it alive long after a strong opening weekend.

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Johansson’s character begins as a party girl studying in Taipei whose new boyfriend ( Julian Rhind-Tutt ) is involved in bad stuff. Thanks to him, she winds up being an unwilling drug mule for Jang ( Choi Min-sik , making the most of a role that forces him to speak through interpreters). A big bag of a superdrug called CPH4 is sewn into her guts, awaiting transport to new markets in Europe. But the bag springs a leak when Lucy is roughed up by her captors, entering her system in such quantities (cue fun CG shots of cellular-level transformations) that it activates huge chunks of cranial real estate she’d never been able to access before — like that little-known lobe that lets you turn off gravity when it suits you.

Helpfully, Besson has been cutting between Lucy’s story and an academic lecture in Paris where researcher Samuel Norman ( Morgan Freeman ) has been hypothesizing about the very thing that is happening to her, making remarkably specific predictions about what might happen if humans were able to use more than the 10 percent we currently use (a myth, by the way ) of the magnificent supercomputers in our heads. His ideas, like some of the film’s other early scenes, are illustrated with cutaways to nature footage suggesting the ways in which all of Earth’s creatures are interconnected, governed by the same laws. Think Luc Besson doing The Tree of Life .

The early stages of Lucy’s transformation offer plenty of kicks and even a touching moment or two: After making her badass escape from Jang and his thugs, she struts into the nearest hospital’s operating room, shoots the patient on the table — a glance at the X-rays told her the patient’s brain tumor was inoperable — and has a surgeon pull out the remaining drugs planted inside her. Forgoing anesthesia, she borrows the surgeon’s phone and calls her mother while he cuts her open, describing what’s going on in her head. “Mom, I can feel everything,” she says as the camera almost imperceptibly rocks; sensations and emotions stretching back to her birth are available to her, triggering what proves to be almost the last human-like response she has in the film.

From here on out, Johansson’s performance grows colder and more analytical. Besson doesn’t let her become as persuasively alien as she is in Under the Skin , but he doesn’t want a human, either. Lucy sets out to round up other batches of the drug and get to Paris, where she can let Dr. Norman see his theories in action. Why do this, one wonders, when in a matter of minutes she has already read his thousands of pages of research and surpassed his understanding?

Plenty of films and novels have envisioned what would happen if we gained conscious control over our entire brain. While most would probably make a real neuroscientist cackle uncontrollably, it’s hard to recall one whose ideas were more laughable than this one. We may roll with the film as its heroine learns Taiwanese over the course of a cab ride or sees the electromagnetic spectrum of cellphone calls, swiping through them as if she were reading their conversations on a touchscreen. We may even buy it when she’s able to change her body at will — sure, growing a webbed hand would take some time and fuel, but at least a body’s cells are controlled by its brain. But the film gives not the slightest justification for Lucy’s increasingly godlike abilities, which soon include time travel and levitation. Every now and then, a nugget of real philosophy is dropped into the screenplay, but it’s surrounded by so much blather that even a generous viewer has trouble using it to justify what Lucy experiences.

Even more damning in an action film, Besson doles out powers in a way that nullifies much of the drama to come. Once we’ve seen this woman put an entire room of people to sleep with the wave of a hand, why would we be worried for her when a smaller gang is pointing guns at her? (And why wouldn’t she just pull the same trick here, instead of wasting her time with showier and less believable feats?)

The movie occasionally attempts to make Lucy’s quest accessible to mortal viewers. Though she doesn’t need the assistance of a French cop named Del Rio ( Amr Waked ), for instance, she keeps him with her as “a reminder” of her fading humanity. But the reality-based action (a long, wrong-way trip through Paris traffic; a showdown with gangsters who want their drugs back) feels irrelevant to what the film really wants to show us. Unfortunately, though it concludes with a line suggesting Lucy has finally found all the answers, Lucy never tells us what the question is.

Production company: EuropaCorp Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman, Min-sik Choi, Amr Waked, Julian Rhind-Tutt Director-Screenwriter: Luc Besson Producer: Virginie Silla Executive producer: Marc Shmuger Director of photography: Thierry Arbogast Production designer: Hugues Tissandier Costume designer: Olivier Beriot Editor: Julien Rey Music: Eric Serra

Rated R, 90 minutes

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Movie Reviews

'lucy': hot buttered popcorn, with plenty of nuts.

Chris Klimek

Based on the theory that humans only use 10 percent of their brains, science-fiction film Lucy explores the possibilities when humans use full mental capacity through the title character played by Scarlett Johansson.

As Lucy is able to use more of her brain, and her abilities continue to evolve, she looks to professor Samuel Norman — an expert on the human brain played by Morgan Freeman — for some explanations. Jessica Forde/Universal Pictures hide caption

What would you do if you could access 100 percent of your brain's potential processing power? Reverse climate change? Pick up new languages while you sleep? Pay your rent on time? Invent an iPhone capable of making and receiving telephone calls?

More important: Would you savor the salty, crunchy, hot-buttered freshness of writer-director-mogul Luc Besson's wiggedy-wack but truly, madly deeply watchable thriller Lucy — a Ritalin-spiked pixy stick of a movie that pinches almost as much from Tree of Life as it does from The Matrix — even more? Or considerably less?

If it's the latter, then I pity you, Mr. or Ms. Fully Self-Actualized.

Look, this was already Scarlett Johansson's year: Just in the past eight months, she's given movie-elevating performances as the voice of Samantha, the self-aware operating system in Her (way to steal a film where we never even see you!); as the canny covert operative Black Widow in Captain America: The Winter Soldier (way not to get buried amid all that expensive pixel-smashing!); and, most spectacularly, as a mysterious being on a mysterious mission in Under the Skin, 2014's most purely cinematic film to date. Though made for a modest $13 million, it's recouped less than 20 percent of that in U.S. theatrical receipts. This is why we can't have nice movies, America. (In fact, we've had rather a lot of them this summer, no?)

Anyway, Lucy feels like the pre-chewed multiplex companion piece to that art house provocation, and a victory lap for its fascinating star. It isn't, how you say, smart , but — like last month's terrific Edge of Tomorrow — it's smarter than you expect. Which, adjusted for blockbuster inflation and high fructose corn syrup intake, feels like Very Smart Indeed, at least for the svelte 89 minutes of your life this film demands. At last, a would-be summer blockbuster that respects your time!

Arriving on the heels of the fifth Spider-Man and the seventh X-Men, Lucy channels the "Hey, Kids — SCIENCE!" spirit of early '60s Marvel Comics more truly than either of them. In those scripts that Stan "The Man" Lee used to grind out at a rate of six or seven per month, exposure to radiation invariably conferred superpowers instead of cancer. Well. Lucy does for recreational drugs what The Fantastic Four did for Gamma Rays. If the overdose is massive enough and the dope powerful enough, it unlocks doors previously accessible only to those who've read The Secret . Or Flowers for Algernon.

For the first 10 minutes, our Lucy (ScarJo) is just a party-loving American expat in Taipei who has fallen in with a really wrong crowd. A family of mobsters commanded by Choi Min-sik — the South Korean star of Park Chan-wook's admirably sick-minded international hit Oldboy — sews a bag of superdope inside her gut against her will, which is as every bit as gross and terrifying as it sounds. When the bag ruptures, instead of expiring in a blast of endorphin-soaked euphoria, our Lucy finds herself crabwalkin' on the ceiling like Linda Blair. Or Lionel Ritchie. Or Spider-Pig, depending on what decade this is.

But these are mere growing pains on the bumpy road to post-biological omnipotence (so long, deodorant! Smell ya later, dental floss!), a road that — as Brilliant Neuroscientist or Something Dr. Morgan Freeman, Ph.D. (Morgan Freeman) explains in a lecture at L'Académie du Cinéma la Fausee Science et Exposition that's intercut with the drug-smuggling story — we too could travel If We Only Had The Full Use of Our Pre-Installed Brain, as the song goes.

It's actually a different Suspiciously Well-Informed Movie Doctor who has the duty of explaining to ScarJo that the stuff in her system is in fact a synthetic version of a chemical expectant mothers produce naturally to nourish the babies in their wombs. As that baby formula swims through her all-grown-up bloodstream, ScarJo begins another cycle of rapid evolution, developing the ability to manipulate her body at the cellular level, to see and manipulate radio waves, and eventually, to surf the space-time continuum from an office chair.

Which is not where I was expecting this movie to go.

Sorry, what's that? Yes, of course she's gonna take care of the rapey, tatted-up creeps who tried to make her their drug mule. Lucy goes from tearful sheep to cold-eyed wolf in one scene, but why make us wait? After efficiently sating our bloodlust for those degenerates, the movie gets on to other, more interesting business. Namely, Lucy has to get herself to Dr. Freeman so her unprecedented advance in human evolution can be observed and documented and written about in goop magazine. She also needs to acquire the rest of the stash — there were other mules, you see — "for medicinal purposes," as she deadpans. (This is a movie that confidently understands what its druggies want: More drugs! ALL OF THE DRUGS!)

Besson — best known for the odd and visually rich action pictures La Femme Nikita, Léon : The Professional , and The Fifth Element — churns out films at a tireless pace, but it's been a long while since a picture he directed made much of a splash in Cinémas américains. Last year, his witness protection comedy The Family did a fast fade, despite the presence of Robert De Niro, Tommy Lee Jones and the too-seldom-seen Michelle Pfeiffer. We tend to prefer the Transporter and Taken franchises, wherein Besson, credited as a writer and producer, seems to scribble a few notes on a bar napkin and leave the stunt coordinators to work out the rest. (Which is not to deny Liam Neeson's A Very Particular Set of Skills telephone monologue from Taken its rightful place as the St. Crispin's Day speech of the 21st century.)

Lucy is a welcome reminder of just how much Besson's wry sensibility as a filmmaker adds to movies like this. It opens with a shamelessly prurient extreme close-up of cell division while Eric Serra's vaguely porn-y slow-jam score bumps and grinds along. When Lucy is in danger, Besson (who also edited the picture) cuts to shots of a big cat stalking a gazelle. Later, we get flashes of animals (and humans) mating and giving birth, a real-time, channel-surfing commentary on the story we're watching. It seems impossible that no filmmaker has thought to do this already, but I can't think of one offhand. Good job, Monsieur Besson.

Like so many other movies this summer, this is an international affair, traveling from Taipei to Berlin to Paris. Egyptian actor Amr Waked even gets a second-banana role as a bewildered Parisian police captain.

But Besson finds a way to make his obligatory superhero origin scenes feel fresh. In the funniest doctor visit in a movie since the xenomorph abortion in Prometheus , Lucy corrals a surgeon at gunpoint and orders him to remove the leaking bag of superdope. While he's doing that, she phones home. One of the drug's early effects is total recall of everything she's ever experienced. "I can remember the taste of your milk," she tells her bewildered mom. At least one person in the theater groaned in revulsion, but I thought it was touching.

The climax, set in Paris, crosscuts Lucy's meetup with a roomful of the World's Most Brilliant Scientists with a gunbattle between the French police and the Taiwanese gangsters in the corridors outside. (Smuggling drugs through customs requires surgical rape, but flying from Taipei to Paris with enough fully automatic weapons to storm the Bastille all over again ain't no thing, apparently.) Besson cuts the shootout in a way that conveys his diminished interest in it: One insert shows a statue, probably hundreds of years old, losing its nose to a stray round. Always these morons and their guns, its expression seems to say.

Meanwhile at the grown-up table, ScarJo holds court with the eggheads. "Now that I have access to the furthest reaches of my brain, I see things clearly," she begins.

It doesn't even sound clunky when she says it. Now that , ladies and gentlemen, is a movie star.

Screen Rant

Lucy ending explained.

Humans only use 10% of their brains. but after Lucy is exposed to a drug that unlocks even more potential, she transforms into something new.

  • Humans do not actually only use 10% of their brains, as claimed in the movie Lucy.
  • The drug CPH-4 is not a real substance and does not have the same effects as depicted in the film.
  • Lucy's transformation at 100% brain capacity transcends space and time, leaving behind a flash drive for humanity's evolution.

At the end of Lucy , Scarlett Johansson's Lucy transforms into a living computer and leaves Morgan Freeman with the keys to taking the human race to the next step of its evolution. Lucy is a 2014 movie written and directed by Luc Besson featuring performances from Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman, and more.

After Lucy is kidnapped and forced to traffic the experimental drug CPH-4, surgically hidden in her own body, the bag is broken, flooding her system with the drug and allowing her brain to unlock new levels of consciousness. Initially, Lucy's abilities manifest as higher levels of learning and intelligence, but as her brain changes even more, her connection to time and space continues to shift. By the time Lucy unlocks 100 percent of her brain's ability at the end of Lucy , she becomes something else entirely.

Related: 5 Sci-Fi Movie Premises Debunked by Real Science

Is Lucy Scientifically Accurate?

Do we really only use 10 percent of our brains is cph-4 real.

The basic premise of Lucy is that the human brain has far greater abilities than we currently access, which is true on a number of levels, but the notion that humans only use 10 percent of our brain was thoroughly debunked by a number of scientists, including an article at Journal Nature , after Lucy 's theatrical release. The notion that we don't utilize all of our cognitive potential has been a sentiment among philosophers and scientists for centuries, although the specific 10 percent claim seems to have originated with Lowell Thomas' forward to Dale Carnegie's book How to Win Friends and Influence People in 1936.

The claim that we only use 10 percent of our brain isn't only inaccurate according to imaging scans and other scientific measurements, but it's also an entirely wrong paradigm to even use to measure human cognitive capacity. While there's time and energy constraints on what humans are capable of accomplishing in a single day, physical and cognitive accomplishments continue to excel throughout time, so to say only 10 percent of the brain was being utilized would imply knowledge of a fixed upper limit of human potential and where we currently exist within that limit, which would be impossible to know unless the day comes where humanity actually hits the hypothetical limit.

Related: 5 Movies That Launched Scarlett Johansson's Career (& 5 That Missed The Mark)

When it comes to CPH-4 miracle drug that unlocked Lucy's potential, the movie claims it's a natural chemical produced in tiny amounts by pregnant mothers to help babies rapidly grow their skeleton and nervous system, but that's also not entirely accurate. CPH-4 itself is an entirely fabricated substance, although there are special chemicals produced by mothers to facilitate rapid fetal development, just not any that are synthesized as a street drug, and certainly not any that are known to unlock brain capacity in adults. Most processes that facilitate rapid development in fetuses or young children result in cancerous growth when present in adults.

Why Didn't CPH-4 Affect Anyone Else The Way it Affected Lucy?

If jang knew the real effects of cph-4, he would have taken it himself..

CPH-4 unlocked the unused 90 percent of Lucy's brain, but it worked very differently for her than it did for anyone else. The only other person to be shown consuming any of the product was the test subject in Jang's office. He only inhaled a small particle, and while it clearly had some sort of effect on him, Jang shot him in the head before any clear results manifested. Meanwhile, Lucy was exposed to CPH-4 when the bag inside her stomach ruptured, releasing a large quantity directly into her bloodstream. It was immediately clear how it hit her differently since she levitated up the wall, which the test subject in Jang's office didn't do.

Surely other test subjects used at least small amounts of CPH-4 during the drug's development process, but based on how little CPH-4 the test subject in Jang's office took, it's likely they never saw even a hint of the kind of effects experienced by Lucy. Additionally, Jang shot the man in his office who snorted just a single grain, and if that's indicative of how other test subjects were treated, it makes sense that Lucy is the only one to achieve the states she did. If anyone in the test process had achieved any major cognitive boost, surely Jang would have exploited it for his own purposes, if not before Lucy, then certainly after.

What Did Lucy Become at 100 Percent?

Lucy is everywhere now..

Lucy gained more and more access to her brain's abilities throughout the movie, but when she reached 100 percent, she became something else entirely. She had to sit still in a chair for several minutes as a shiny black substance covered her body and stretched out to all the computers and network equipment in the room, seemingly consuming them in the process. During this time, her body and mind completely changed on a cellular level as the movie depicts cells combining and other changes happening on both a molecular and cosmic level as she reached her full potential. When she reached 100 percent, she completely dematerialized.

Related: 15 Secrets Behind The Making Of Lucy

After Lucy was gone, all she left behind was a cosmic-looking flash drive for Professor Norman. Del Rio also received a text from her saying "I am everywhere." Instead of asking "what" Lucy is at the end of Lucy , it would be more appropriate to ask where and when Lucy is. She hasn't simply transcended into a new physical being, she's seemingly transcended space and time altogether, leaving behind the cosmic flash drive like a miniature obelisk from 2001: A Space Odyssey to guide humanity on the next step of its evolution.

Lucy's Ending and True Meaning Explained

What's lucy's real message.

The opening scene of Lucy shows Lucy, posited by some scientists as the first-ever human based on a partial skeleton discovered in 1974. The scene has a voiceover from Scarlett Johansson's Lucy saying "life was given to us a billion years ago, what have we done with it?" During the ending of Lucy , as she prepares to reach 100 percent and begins to transcend time and space, she goes to see the prehistoric Lucy and reaches out to touch her hand, launching into a cosmic vision as Lucy sees the world rolled back, cells combine, and the universe unravels in reverse before her eyes ending with 100 percent.

At the end of Lucy, Lucy has evolved beyond a need of a human body and returns to the same question from the opening, instead saying "life was given to us a billion years ago. Now you know what to do with it." There's a few things going on in this moment. Lucy is passing on all the knowledge she gained from her evolution following her consumption of the CPH-4 on to Professor Norman so humanity can evolve, but she may also be introducing a bit of a paradox, as one reading could suggest she went back in time to give the prehistoric Lucy a spark of intelligence, touching fingers in a reference to Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam painting.

As Lucy explains to Professor Norman, our concept of time is entirely determined by our limited ability to experience it linearly, so what someone who is (hypothetically, using the movie's logic) only utilizing 10 percent of their brain would perceive as a paradox would appear entirely differently to someone who'd reached 100 percent actualization. Regardless of the reading, Lucy's voiceover at the end of Lucy saying "now you know what to do with it" is a charge for Norman (and presumably the audience) to push forward and expand the scope of human consciousness.

lucy movie review quora

‘Lucy’ movie review

Imagine you took Limitless , stripped away the internal logic, cut it with an episode of Planet Earth , and force fed everyone involved a lot of crack cocaine. You would more or less have Luc Besson’s new film, Lucy .

Our gal Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) is an American student in Taiwan who finds herself in hot water when she is kidnapped by some sadistic Korean gangsters, led by Oldboy ’s Choi Min-Sik.

Lucy is forced into being a drug mule, and has a packet of a brand new synthetic drug inserted into her abdomen so she can transport it overseas. Before long a large quantity of the drug has been released into her system – mainly because sadistic Korean gangsters aren’t so smart with choosing which body parts to kick.

What happens next is hard to explain, as it makes no sense, but in a nutshell: Lucy slowly gains the ability to use 100% of her brain (not a thing, by the way), gets super-duper ridiculous God powers, and spends the rest of the film barreling around talking about the human experience, killing people and messing with every longstanding convention of good storytelling.

Dealing with big existential questions is a theme common to cinema; in the superhero genre the big ideas are relayed via characters who are larger than life, and whose power enables them to see beyond the trivialities of human existence.

The real problem in Besson’s film is that there is no consistent point of human contact to offset Lucy’s chaotic supernatural power. There is no Lois Lane to Lucy’s Superman, no Silk Spectre to her Dr Manhattan. And – to stretch that last comparison a little further – it is fairly baffling that not more was nicked from Watchmen ’s big blue radioactive man.

Dr Manhattan and Lucy are both characters who go, via the path of freak accident, from human to superhuman and beyond, in the process shedding their connections to Earth. But in Lucy, there is no sense of what she has left behind, or how she feels about this sudden and overwhelming transformation.

Indeed, the only moment of emotional catharsis occurs when Lucy speaks to her offscreen mother, who is so blandly supportive and amiable we can only suspect it’s the T-1000 on the other end of the line.

Then again, this is a film in which no one, not one character, has any emotional attachment to another person on the screen. Blank-faced god-thing Lucy races through this film exploiting her random sidekicks as and when she needs them, not to mention actively murdering innocent bystanders who get in her way.

Into this mix is thrown Morgan Freeman, playing an extremely dubious scientist who says things like “From evolution to revolution!” (which, by the way, gets an inexplicable amount of applause), and a French policeman who we are told is there to remind Lucy about, like, being human and stuff. Hey Lucy! What about all those pedestrians you just mowed down? What did they remind you of?

Everything put aside, Lucy might have been salvageable if there was any reason for us to really root for our title character.

But the frustrating lack of expression in Johansson’s performance, coupled with the total absence of character development, means it is very hard for us to like our heroine, or even understand her motivation at any point in the film. And, at the end of the day, that makes an already ludicrous story entirely unbelievable.

For a film that’s about brain capacity, Lucy doesn’t do much to tickle your grey matter.

Released in UK cinemas and IMAX on Friday 22 August 2014.

> Follow Florence Vincent on Twitter.

What did you think of Lucy ? Let us know below…

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Pulpy, violent sci-fi actioner is entertaining, thoughtful.

Lucy Poster Image

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Through its sci-fi concept (and in between fights,

Lucy engages in brutal violence with no consequenc

Strong fantasy violence, with lots of blood. Many

A documentary-type flashback shows animals having

"S--t" is used twice. "Ass," "a--hole," and "hell"

A bottle of Evian water is used to clean a charact

Fictitious drugs and drug smuggling are a major pa

Parents need to know that Lucy is a sci-fi/action movie starring Scarlett Johansson. The violence gets fairly graphic, with lots of shoot outs and blood splattering everywhere. The main female character is manhandled, punched, and kicked, and she also kills some bad guys without consequence. The plot concerns…

Positive Messages

Through its sci-fi concept (and in between fights, shoot outs, and chases), the movie makes several interesting, thoughtful pronouncements: that humans are currently more concerned with having than with being, that nothing ever truly dies, that ignorance creates chaos but knowledge does not, and that we as humans have the capability to change things.

Positive Role Models

Lucy engages in brutal violence with no consequences, and no one in real life could emulate her. But she also has a strength and dedication that's inspiring in a female movie hero. And after she solves the immediate problem of her survival, she genuinely wishes to use her powers for good and for the future of mankind.

Violence & Scariness

Strong fantasy violence, with lots of blood. Many characters are shot and killed, with blood splattering all over. Characters' hands and faces are covered in blood. Characters are used as drug mules, and the drugs are sewn up inside their intestines, requiring several bloody surgeries throughout the movie. Many chases and shoot outs with random death and destruction throughout. The main female character is grabbed, manhandled, punched, and kicked in several early scenes. She shoots and kills several bad guys without consequence. A character is stabbed in the hands with knives.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

A documentary-type flashback shows animals having sex, followed by a woman having sex with a man in a car; nothing sensitive is shown, but what they're doing is clear enough. This is followed by images of birth, both animals and humans. The main character is sometimes sexualized through her outfits. In two instances, male characters place their hands down the front of her top. In one scene, Lucy, while fully clothed, spreads her legs apart to seduce a guard, though she quickly defeats him. Lucy kisses a helpful cop.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

"S--t" is used twice. "Ass," "a--hole," and "hell" are also heard.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

A bottle of Evian water is used to clean a character's bloody hands. A Peugeot is driven during a car chase. Samsung products appear a few times.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Fictitious drugs and drug smuggling are a major part of the plot. A crazed junkie snorts the new drug. Viewers see a brief flashback of a character drinking a shot in a bar. She drinks a shot of whisky with the bad guy while preparing to become a drug mule. And she drinks a sip of champagne on an airplane. The bad guy smokes a cigarette.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Lucy is a sci-fi/action movie starring Scarlett Johansson . The violence gets fairly graphic, with lots of shoot outs and blood splattering everywhere. The main female character is manhandled, punched, and kicked, and she also kills some bad guys without consequence. The plot concerns fictitious drugs and using drug mules to smuggle them, which requires some bloody operations to get them in and out of people's bellies. There are some quick documentary-like flashback scenes of sex between animals as well as between humans, and the main character sometimes wears sexy, objectifying outfits. Language isn't frequent but does contain at least two uses of "s--t." Characters sometimes drink alcohol. It's all pretty intense, but the movie is so slick and thoughtful that teens may come away thinking about the ideas more than the iffy content. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Based on 15 parent reviews

Entertaining and interesting

What's the story.

Lucy ( Scarlett Johansson ) is a pretty normal young woman, living in Taipei and dating a delivery guy for the local mob. But when she gets roped into delivering a suitcase to the boss, Mr. Jang (Choi Min-sik), she unwittingly becomes a mule for a new kind of drug, carrying it in her stomach cavity. When the bag bursts and the drug is released, Lucy discovers untapped portions of her brain beginning to work. She's suddenly able to see and feel everything. As the drug continues to open up her brain, she begins to be able to move matter. She decides to collect the rest of the drug to buy herself some time and then meet with brain expert Professor Norman ( Morgan Freeman ) to decide what to do with her knowledge. But Mr. Jang is on her trail.

Is It Any Good?

Scientists have already pointed out that the idea that humans use only 10 percent of the brain is a myth, but that shouldn't detract from the fun of Luc Besson 's terrific LUCY. It's a movie that manages to be thoughtful and exciting at the same time. Smarter than Transcendence and more exhilarating than Limitless , Lucy showcases Besson's skill and enthusiasm. His wide frame is filled with colorful cityscapes and a dazzling array of information and input. His jokey little documentary flashbacks broaden the scope, and he crafts slick, clear, superior action sequences.

Yet the movie hinges on Johannson's potent, searching performance, constantly recording the information around her. Her process, moving from struggle to awareness, is highly appealing. (When she pauses to phone her mom, her need is fully apparent.) Then, after all the fighting is done, Lucy leaves mankind with a message of hope. It may be a silly, pulpy "B" movie, but it's a good one.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Lucy 's violence . How much was necessary to get across the movie's point? Was it enough? Too much? How did it make you feel?

How does the drug smuggling subplot enhance or detract from the movie as a whole?

What does the main character learn with her enhanced intellect? What lessons can be taken away from this movie?

Is the main character a strong female role model ? Why or why not?

What scientific concepts did you learn from the movie? What further research would you be interested in doing? Do humans really only use 10 percent of their brain?

Movie Details

  • In theaters : July 25, 2014
  • On DVD or streaming : January 20, 2015
  • Cast : Scarlett Johansson , Morgan Freeman , Analeigh Tipton
  • Director : Luc Besson
  • Inclusion Information : Female actors, Black actors
  • Studio : Universal Pictures
  • Genre : Action/Adventure
  • Run time : 90 minutes
  • MPAA rating : R
  • MPAA explanation : strong violence, disturbing images, and sexuality
  • Last updated : March 2, 2024

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By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

Remember Limitless , the 2011 thriller in which Bradley Cooper becomes a whirling killer dervish from a drug that lets him access 100 percent of his brain? Well, Lucy is basically the same movie with Scarlett Johansson in the Cooper role. It’s not a good trade-off.

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Justin timberlake's 'everything i thought it was' tells us what we already knew, 'civil war' imagines america's worst-case-scenario right around the corner, christina applegate first felt ms symptoms years before diagnosis: 'i didn’t pay attention'.

Johansson’s Lucy is 100 percent in the looks department. Otherwise she’s just a student in Taiwan who gets tricked into becoming a drug moll for the sadistic Mr. Jang (Choi Min Sik). When the drug implanted into her intestines springs a leak, Lucy is suddenly a superbrain, capable of all kinds of things, kinky and lethal.

It sounds cool. Plus I’m basically a sucker for filmmaker Luc Besson’s female warriors, from La Femme Nikita (Anne Parillaud) to The Professional (Natalie Portman) and The Fifth Element (Milla Jovovich). And, hell, Johansson can do everything Cooper does, and in heels. But Besson lets the fun drain out of Lucy . Things get all pokey and ponderous when Morgan Freeman shows up as a professor who explains the “meaning” of what’s going on. What starts as a batshit female revenge fantasy ends as a bad LSD trip. Talk about a buzzkill.

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Home — Essay Samples — Entertainment — Movie Review — “Lucy” by Luc Besson: Film Review

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"Lucy" by Luc Besson: Film Review

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Words: 514 |

Published: Jul 17, 2018

Words: 514 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Works Cited:

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  • Gilling, D., & Pawson, J. (1985). Crime, poverty and the environment. Longman.
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  • National Institute of Justice. (2015). Understanding property crime. Retrieved from https://www.nij.gov/topics/crime/property-crime/Pages/welcome.aspx
  • National Police Foundation. (2017). Police corruption: An analytical look into police ethics. Retrieved from https://www.policefoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/An-Analytical-Look-into-Police-Ethics.pdf
  • O’Reilly, T. (2016). Security camera system design and implementation for industrial and commercial applications. Wiley.
  • Pease, K. (1998). Repeat victimization. Criminal Justice Press.
  • Rosenbaum, D. P., & Lurigio, A. J. (1994). Crime and the economy. Sage Publications.
  • Smith, D. A., & Jarjoura, G. R. (1988). Social structure and criminal victimization. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 25(1), 27-52.
  • Wilson, J. Q., & Kelling, G. L. (1982). Broken windows: The police and neighborhood safety. The Atlantic Monthly, 249(3), 29-38.

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IMAGES

  1. Film Review: Lucy (2014)

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  2. Lucy, film review: Scarlett Johansson will blow your mind in Luc Besson

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  3. Movie Review: Lucy

    lucy movie review quora

  4. Lucy: Movie Review

    lucy movie review quora

  5. Movie Review: Lucy

    lucy movie review quora

  6. Movie Review: 'Lucy' (2014)

    lucy movie review quora

VIDEO

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  5. "Lucy" සිංහල Movie Review

  6. (Lucy) movie part 3 explained in hindi #treanding #explain #movie #movieinsight #shorts

COMMENTS

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  2. Lucy Movie Review, Thoughts and Analysis : r/Lucy

    Just like God, Lucy is all-knowing, everywhere, and undying. It is supposedly a myth that we use only 10% of our brain capacities, but more accurately put we use only 10% of our brain's energy resources. This is because this is enough for our daily activities. However, if we were to access greater than lets say 30% and increasingly more closer ...

  3. What were your thoughts on Lucy? : r/movies

    I was charmed by its earnestness, the way intelligence was considered a gift by Lucy and how the whole premise wrapped up in the end. I'd rate the film above average, especially compared to the other film I saw that day, the incredibly ugly and cynical Hercules. First 1/3 was great, but the rest was mediocre.

  4. Lucy movie review & film summary (2014)

    Advertisement. Nevertheless: "Lucy" is a fun, confident work. It's fast and tight and playful even when it's sadistic and violent, which is often. It lasts about 90 minutes and change but feels longer in a good way, because every second is packed tight. It's full of itself, yet it still keeps winking at you.

  5. 'Lucy' review: dissecting Scarlett Johansson's perfect brain

    Movie Review 'Lucy' review: dissecting Scarlett Johansson's perfect brain. In Luc Besson's latest, the augmented human is so flawless she's boring . By Molly Osberg on July 24, 2014 09:58 am ...

  6. Lucy (2014 film)

    Lucy is a 2014 English-language French science fiction action film written and directed by Luc Besson for his company EuropaCorp, and produced by his wife, Virginie Besson-Silla.It is an English-language film shot in Taipei, Paris, and New York City.It stars Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman, Choi Min-sik, and Amr Waked.Johansson portrays the titular character, a woman who gains psychokinetic ...

  7. Lucy, film review: Scarlett Johansson will blow your mind in Luc

    (15) Luc Besson, 90 mins Starring: Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman

  8. [Spoiler] The ending of "Lucy" : r/movies

    But I found the ending actually pretty interesting and wanted to discuss my theory. Is Lucy actually God? When she reaches 100% she basicly becomes omnipresent and omnipotent, transcending both time and space. That's pretty much what God is supposedly about. So is there perhaps some space-time-paradoxon that god - in the form of Lucy - is ...

  9. REVIEW: I Love Lucy

    The French writer-director's sci-fi action movie stars Scarlett Johansson as a woman whose use of her full intellectual potential makes her a kick-ass superhuman

  10. 'Lucy' Review: Scarlett Johansson Grows Smarter As the Movie Gets

    Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) is a freewheeling expat American in Taiwan, blowing off her studies for nightclub carousing, until the day her boyfriend handcuffs a briefcase to her arm and sends her to ...

  11. 'Lucy' movie review: Scarlett Johansson's powerful mind, unlocked and

    An earlier version of this review incorrectly identified a character as a Tokyo crime boss. The character of Mr. Jang, played by South Korean actor Choi Min-Sik, operates out of Taipei, Taiwan.

  12. Lucy

    With her former captors in pursuit, Lucy seeks out a neurologist (Morgan Freeman), who she hopes will be able to help her. Rating: R (Sexuality|Disturbing Images|Strong Violence) Genre: Action ...

  13. Lucy (2014)

    Cast. Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman, Choi Min-sik, Amr Waked, Julian Rhind-Tutt, Analeigh Tipton. Rated. R. Runtime. 89 min. Release Date. 07/25/2014. A film dependent on the myth that we use only 10 percent of our brain, and further driven by the notion of unlocking 100 percent of the brain's potential, Lucy, by writer-director Luc ...

  14. Lucy

    Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Apr 17, 2019. Hope Madden Screen Relish. Apparently believing the film to be an equally eloquent statement on mankind's past, purpose, and future. It isn't ...

  15. Luc Besson's Surprisingly Metaphysical "Lucy"

    July 25, 2014. The early trailer for Luc Besson's new film, "Lucy," promised giddy digital wizardry, and the movie delivers, in a way that surprised me. I saw that it would have a pulp ...

  16. 'Lucy': Film Review

    A top-shelf cast and the (fading) memory of Besson's action hits will help the picture at the box office, but word of mouth is unlikely to keep it alive long after a strong opening weekend. The ...

  17. Movie Review: Lucy : NPR

    Good job, Monsieur Besson. Like so many other movies this summer, this is an international affair, traveling from Taipei to Berlin to Paris. Egyptian actor Amr Waked even gets a second-banana role ...

  18. Lucy Ending Explained

    At the end of Lucy, Scarlett Johansson's Lucy transforms into a living computer and leaves Morgan Freeman with the keys to taking the human race to the next step of its evolution.Lucy is a 2014 movie written and directed by Luc Besson featuring performances from Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman, and more.. After Lucy is kidnapped and forced to traffic the experimental drug CPH-4, surgically ...

  19. 'Lucy' movie review

    Imagine you took Limitless, stripped away the internal logic, cut it with an episode of Planet Earth, and force fed everyone involved a lot of crack cocaine.You would more or less have Luc Besson's new film, Lucy. Our gal Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) is an American student in Taiwan who finds herself in hot water when she is kidnapped by some sadistic Korean gangsters, led by Oldboy's Choi ...

  20. Lucy Movie Review

    Parents Need to Know. Parents need to know that Lucy is a sci-fi/action movie starring Scarlett Johansson. The violence gets fairly graphic, with lots of shoot outs and blood splattering everywhere. The main female character is manhandled, punched, and kicked, and she also kills some bad guys without consequence. The plot concerns….

  21. 'Lucy' Movie Review

    Trending. Johansson's Lucy is 100 percent in the looks department. Otherwise she's just a student in Taiwan who gets tricked into becoming a drug moll for the sadistic Mr. Jang (Choi Min Sik ...

  22. Movie Review: 'Lucy'

    Under the White Mask: The Film That Haesaerts Could Have Made

  23. "Lucy" by Luc Besson: Film Review

    Essay grade: Good. "Lucy" is a 2014 English-language French science fiction thriller film written and directed by Luc Besson and produced by his wife Virginie Besson-Silla for his company EuropaCorp. Shot in Taipei, Paris, and New York City, the movie features Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman, Choi Min-sik, and Amr Waked.