I think this film is a little confused, but it is fun anyway.

Rating: 7/10 (5 August 2014)

If I were to describe this film in a single sentence it would be that it is either a philosophical treatise masquerading as an action movie, or it is an action movie masquerading as a philosophical treatise, but which I am cannot sure. In a way part of it appeared to be little more than a documentary with some action scenes thrown in, and while the concept was good, I found the execution to pretty much flop. Look, it was not that it was a bad film (I still gave it a seven because I did enjoy it), but it feels that Besson's great films (Fifth Element, the Professional) are long behind him.
This is a film about evolution, and in particular human evolution, but the idea that is explored is what is needed to spark then next evolutionary development, and what is it that is holding us back. My immediate response would be that if it took millions of years for things to evolve to where they are now, then it is unlikely that there is going to be any huge spurts in our lifetime. That theory suggests that things change very, very gradually, and as such we are unlikely to see, or experience, any significant changes.
However there is another theory that seems to be espoused here, and that is that evolution occurs when outside forces interplay. That is that creatures tend not to evolve, or change, simply due to time but rather due to the effects of, say, changes in climate. We can see this with diseases because a disease that may ravage one generation may have no effect upon the next generation, which means that for the disease to take effect it must mutate to overcome the resistance of the second generation. We might develop a drug that kills a certain disease, however overuse of the drug will cause the disease to mutate and change and become resistant to this drug.
This film is about a young lady who gets caught up in a rather vicious drug cartel operating out of Taiwan. The thing is that this cartel has developed a new drug which they wish to export to the western countries and to do this they cut the drug mules open and place the bags into their stomachs. However, one of the cartel's thugs decided to beat our heroine up because she won't play ball with him, which causes the drugs in her stomach to spill out. This results in her having a rather strange reaction: she develops psychic powers. For some reason she ends up connecting this change in here with the theories of some university lecturer and tries to find him to tell him what is happening to her and also so that she can pass a heap of knowledge onto him because, well, she doesn't have all that much time to live.
The interesting thing that I found about this movie was the idea of why we are not evolving, and the suggestion is that the reason we are not evolving is because we are simply too caught up with external pleasures, such as wealth and power. We don't necessarily want to better ourselves mentally or intellectually, but rather financially and luxuriously. Also, the very people that could work to advance us as a species, the academics, simply do not want to rule, which leaves us with greedy morons who are only seeking to better their own position at the expense of everybody else.