Incoherent

Rating: 3/10 (19 March 2017)

This isn't a film which bears close scrutiny. It appears to have been developed from the mashing together of a few factoids, without any deeper understanding or research.
i, The three million year old skeleton of Australopithecus afarensis named "Lucy" evidences the progression of skull size and brainpower in our species' development.
ii, Lucy was named for a song which many believe is about drugs.
iii, The odd idea that seems to have taken hold that we only use 10% of our brain.
Add in a superhero element, some strands of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Christian deity themes of omniscience, omnipresence, and Michaelangelo's Creation of Adam, obligatory violence and a car chase.
As a thesis, it fails utterly. As a distraction, it was enough to keep me watching to the end; a ridiculous end, at that, where Lucy turns herself into graphite powder and a suspiciously long USB stick (as if that's what humans are fashioned from).
There's the usual Hollywood fare of casting an English-accented male as a baddie, zero concern for incidentals who die as a result of the plot, a deep confusion between intelligence and memory, and a professor whose gibberish is eaten up by other academics because he talks slowly and appears to be amusing himself in his own mind with hyper intelligent asides (even though he actually seems to be thinking about some cat videos he saw on YouTube).
There's enough in the film for reviewers to hang a theory on but it's all so incoherent. People will always try to connect dots that really aren't connected; it's human nature. If I made a film about Fred Flintstone, a tortoise, some spam, and Donald Trump's elbow, someone would make a connection. Admit it - you want to.
All that said, the car chase was rather spiffy, and I liked the font used to display what percentage of her brain Lucy was using. The rest was risible. It's what I expect from Hollywood, but not really what I've come to expect from Luc Besson.