Surprisingly smart and enjoyable for a relatively dumb plot. Johansson is stellar.

Rating: 7/10 (1 September 2014)

How do you like your action movies? Straight-up and balls-out, no brains required? Or something a wee bit more thoughtful, even if the philosophy being peddled is wacky science and hardly substantiated by scientific inquiry? Either way, oddly enough, you should be quite pleased with LUCY, which is a ridiculously fun - if occasionally outrageously silly - action movie, spiced up along the way with some unexpectedly deep ideas about the value of life and love.
Lucy (Scarlett Johansson), an exchange student in Taiwan, is a perfectly ordinary girl with perfectly ordinary concerns. (Leaving aside the fact that she looks like Scarlett Johansson, that is.) Sent into the maw of an international drug syndicate by her skeevy new boyfriend, Lucy is forced to become a drug mule. A brand new experimental drug is sewn into her stomach for transport back to America. But no one expects the bag to be roughly kicked apart, or for the hyper-dangerous drug to sink deep into Lucy's bloodstream. Within minutes, she finds that any previous limitations on her mind and body are rapidly being unlocked - which greatly facilitates her quest for vengeance and, perhaps, something more.
Make no mistake, this is science-fiction of the first order; if you're looking for science-fact, you've definitely come to the wrong place. The notion that humans use only 10% of their brain power has been debunked by scientists but remains stubbornly entrenched as an urban myth. Writer-director Luc Besson relies heavily upon it - and the sonorous, credibility-lending tones of Morgan Freeman as a professor expounding on said theory - for the progression of his story, as Lucy acquires new, terrifying abilities each time she gains access to another portion of her brain. It makes for some quite thrilling, hyper-kinetic scenes, as Lucy moves from manipulating gravity to changing her appearance in a split second. Besson even manages to explore a few weightier ideas tied up with identity: as Lucy's consciousness expands, so too does her understanding of the inter-connectedness of the world around her, and she begins to slip away as an individual.
But Besson does falter along the way - he takes his frankly silly concept so seriously at times that it's hard not to laugh at what he's tossing up on screen. Lucy meets the first primate - a female named Lucy. She gains a soul-changing comprehension of the universe and is nevertheless bent on avenging herself against Mr. Jang (Oldboy's Choi Min-Sik), the brutal head of the drug cartel. LUCY - and Lucy's - final scenes manage to be eerie and ridiculous at the same time.
Fortunately for Besson, Johansson anchors the entire film - even at its flightiest - with a steely humanity that proves absolutely essential in her more dramatic moments. It's sometimes hard to follow the logic of the character (surely Lucy should become more pacifist and less wantonly violent as she gains knowledge?!), but Johansson will make you care anyway. She delivers most of her dialogue with a stony, impassive face, yet somehow allows the great pain and fear Lucy experiences, at least at the beginning, to spill through the cracks of her character. Her few moments of human connection with people who mattered greatly to her in the past - her mother, her room-mate - give this action film more emotional ballast than you'd expect.
LUCY is not, ultimately, Besson's best film - he might well have made that twenty years ago, with The Professional. But it's certainly a nice change of pace and relative quality from the forgettable films he's been overseeing for years - everything from the Transporter and Taken franchises, through to the awkward We're A Nice Normal Family. Smarter than you'd expect, though quite silly as well, there's plenty to enjoy in this high-octane, heart-racing, brain-busting blend of action, emotion, and pop philosophy.