Probably hit or miss for most viewers

Rating: 6/10 (5 May 2020)

This movie has an interesting premise but doesn't do much with it. It has many, many flaws and you'll have to suspend your disbelief in order to enjoy it. A lot. Virtually every minute.
See, the main problem isn't that much that the entire movie bases on the myth that we only use 10% of our brain. I am okay with that, you take this one thing, establish that this IS true in the world this movie takes place and then go with it. But everything else isn't any better. Our brain is doing ONE thing: Thinking! So this drug would make us super smart but that's it. But in the movie the drug allows her to do everything from telekinesis to shapeshifting and outright magic. There are lots of scenes with pseudo-science talk that tries to explain this but you don't need to be a scientist to know all of it is more than fiction, it's fantasy.
On top of all that pseudo-science you'll also get an even bigger dose of pseudo-philosophy. I don't know if they just mixed every remotely related eseteric theory or if it's the fault of the mostly horrible dialogues, but seriously, most of the science and philosophy talk in this movie sounds like they took all the rejected ideas that Lindelof wrote for LOST but were considered too crazy or corny even for him!
If it was just the bad science and corny philosphy, I wouldn't complain, though, as long as it's just a vehicle for a fun action movie. However, it also affects the script and movie.
First, there are many illogical scenes that wouldn't even work within the bad science we get presented. For example Lucy just watches someone speaking a few lines of mandarin and a moment later she is fluent in that language. No matter how smart, you can at best learn the words that have been spoken. Or, later she begins to disintegrate when she is running low on drugs. She literally lost many of her teeth, her skin was peeling off in clouds of dust >and eye was displaced<. Then she takes more drugs and the process isn't just stopped, it magically changed her to the state she was in minutes earlier.
But more importantly, the authors somehow wrote themselves into a corner about one third into the movie because at that point she was already a being with superpowers that nobody could match and here adversaries are still simple humans. During her next encounter with the bad guys there is no fight anymore, she just makes them float around.
So, in order to still have some action scenes, what did they do? Lucy forgets about her superpowers, locks herself in with those scientist to have a slow verbal conversation about her current state even though she is about to build a supercomputer and store every information she has. This forces the poor police to fight the bad guys themselves even though Lucy could have dispatched them easily within a minute or so.
And once you start looking for things like this, you'll notice them everywhere. The very first thing she does after the drugs start powering here is killing half a dozen henchmen with ease within a second. She kills guards without flinching, even that poor guy on the operation table. But she lets the crime boss that is responsible for all of this go without killing him? And again, later, in the police station, she does it again with the captain of the henchmen? Just so we can have another unecessary encounter with them later?
Lucy does, however, kill a lot of innocent byspenders during her car romp through Paris. I mean, yes, we don't see anybody get killed on screen but come on, that many crashes, flipped cars and so on can't be without casualties.
And most of this would easily be avoidable. All they would have needed to do is one of two things:
A) Either tone it down and give her superpowers later in the movie, bit by bit
OR
B) simply let that henchman captain eat some of the remaining drugs at some point so he gets superpowers as well so we can have a proper fight!
But as it is this movie doesn't work as SciFi thriller because the science is so bad, it doesn't work as a philosophic or fun movie because Lucy doesn't really do anything with it, but it also doesn't work as an action movie. I don't even know why many claim it to be one, there aren't many action scenes and the ones we have are either unnecessary, short, underwhelming or a combination of those.
So, why do I still rate it 6 then? It still got that many stars for the eye candy and generally everything else that hasn't to do with the plot. Johanson played well in the first half (later on she is like an emotionless robot) and the special effects were quite good. I was also pleased to see authentic set pieces in Taiwan (I have family there, so I can tell it's genuine). The movie has a lot of potential but it just doesn't know where to go with this.