A terrible movie with a few good ideas

Rating: 3/10 (4 September 2015)

Lucy feels like a misplaced mash-up of silly sci-fi and a weird theoretical documentary, spiralling drearily from its boring beginning to its mind-blowingly pretentious ending. Sadly, it fails in both genres, sacrificing promising action for undue intelligence and coherence for unnecessary visual intricacy, eventually creating a film that is so wrapped up in its far-fetched ideas, it cannot fathom even itself. However, there are certain brief moments in the film that are strangely interesting, occasionally even stimulating the mind beyond what is expected of a common Hollywood action film. That being said, those moments are extremely rare, and barely make up for the overwhelming awfulness of this ridiculous mishmash.
The film begins with our hero, Lucy (played by the wonderfully distant Scarlett Johansson), being blackmailed, witnessing the death of the guy who blackmailed her, and crying an awful lot. Even from the beginning, as the dazed lighting, lack of definite setting and deliberately pretentious cuts to random nature shots (which are even more poorly lit) suggest, this movie has a bloated idea of itself, not realizing that it has provided nothing in its initial few minutes to hold the viewer in any way. Even the subsequent scene in which Scarlett Johansson is interrogated drags on for an awful long time, eventually becoming boring and repetitive.
The movie eventually finds a premise: Lucy is exposed to some fancy new drugs which gradually allow her to use an increased amount of her brain, turning her not only into a lethal killing machine, but also an omnipotent goon with a Messiah complex. With all this new brainpower (and also the knowledge that she is going to die within the next 24 hours), she decides to bequeath her newfound knowledge to humanity, choosing a theoretical neuroscientist (Morgan Freeman) to be her disciple. This choice is made without any explanation, but whatever.
Although my interest in the film remained nonexistent up until this point, I began to feel a certain vile hope creep up upon me, that hope manifesting itself as the promise of crazy, telekinesis-fuelled action scenes. The film had finally slithered past its horrible beginning, its ridiculous premise, and now could proceed into passive, violent oblivion. But, unfortunately, the film saw it fit to avoid such action for completely unnecessary visual eye-grabbers, and mundane sci-fi chatting. The action is thin, kept to a minimum, and slightly disgusting. It feels like the product of the mind of a teenager: unevenly paced, poorly filmed, pretentious, and laughable. Even the characters are unwatchable, being either stunningly wooden, evil, or simply boring.
But eventually the film reaches its ending, where Lucy travels back in time and learns everything there is to know. That one short scene should have been a movie within itself. The visuals are breathtaking, but divinely subtle as well, picking apart what we think we know and showing us what is beyond the limits of our knowledge with such ease and fluidity, that it is hard to dismiss it. Of course, it's all unfounded nonsense, but it's stunning unfounded nonsense. Then, as a final reminder of how terrible this movie is, it shows us that all that was just an excuse to make Lucy into God. Huzzah. The End.
This film isn't really sure what cinematic path to follow, and its failure to span two at once makes it entirely unwatchable.