Exceeds Entertainment

Rating: 8/10 (17 October 2014)

The first two acts, however, are compelling and find Lucy playing out the scenario Norman describes, escaping from — and later eluding — the mobsters, first with a gun, then with nothing other than her rapidly increasing brainpower. Johansson plays Lucy's transformation as believably as possible, starting as a hysterical mess and becoming cold, detached, something beyond human, almost robotic as her enhanced capacity takes her far past the capabilities of anyone else. Examining the toll it takes on Lucy allows us, for a time at least, to forget that it's all basically hogwash. Lucy wants to be a cerebral movie, but its smarts, if you want to call them that, haven't the slightest basis in reality and are, along with the budget, outweighed by Besson's overreaching ambition. The director is at his best crafting an action set piece — and he gives us a few of them here — though what Lucy eventually becomes capable of makes the death and destruction left in her wake, including a lengthy shootout between Parisian police and Taiwanese mobsters, seem trivial.