More intrigue from Luc Besson.

Rating: Null/10 (5 March 2015)

Luc Besson has written and directed such movies as "The Fifth Element", "La Femme Nikita", and "Leon the Professional." So it comes as no surprise that "Lucy" follows in that general mold of mind-bending concepts and an abundance of action.
Scarlett Johansson is Lucy in China and her boyfriend of sorts tries to convince her to deliver a sliver aluminum briefcase to a man in the hotel. Lucy isn't stupid, even though she only uses a small fraction of her brain, she asks what in inside. When he tells her he gets $1000 to make a delivery, she knows something is fishy and wants no part of it. But he slaps handcuffs onto her arm, attached to the briefcase, so she is forced to go in. That is where her adventure begins.
In a parallel story Morgan Freeman as Professor Norman is an expert in human intelligence and over the years has formed theories about what would happen if humans could harness a greater percentage of their brains, say 20% and beyond? As the movie moves along Lucy and Norman are destined to cross paths.
This is all science fiction, and lots of people, good guys and bad, get shot and killed. So take the bad with the good, in the end it is a clever, entertaining movie. And Scarlett Johansson is very good. She is an intelligent, well-educated person and her character and lines are genuine, within the confines of the fiction.
SPOILERS: It turns out a very powerful drug is in the briefcase, a synthetic form of what a pregnant mother produces to allow a fetus to develop its body structure. The bad guys are kidnapping people, implanting a kilo of the drug into their abdomen, sending them back to their European home cities, to be met by an agent to remove the drugs. But when Lucy spurns the advances of a bad guy, he hits her and kicks her in the abdomen, inside the plastic bag breaks, the synthetic drug begins to leak into and be absorbed by her body. This triggers fantastic improvement in her mental abilities, so she is able to hunt down the bad guys and the drugs, help eliminate them, and fuse with Norman's computers to transfer and preserve all the knowledge and wisdom she has gained before she dies shortly.
Edit: Feb 2018 - Watched it again, it all seemed very new to me, still enjoyed it as entertaining Sci-Fi. March 2020, ditto.