Great visuals but missing a solid plot.

Rating: 5/10 (25 July 2014)

Short Version: Lucy, played by Scarlett Johansson, is a student/party girl in Taipei who hooks up with an unsavory character, Richard. Richard locks a briefcase onto Lucy's wrist and sends her to make a delivery. Lucy ends up as a coerced drug mule and is exposed to the drugs she carries, which naturally give her super powers. Lucy spends the rest of the movie tracking down the other drug mules to ingest the chemicals they carry, while evading the gangsters who initially grabbed her. She plans to use the drugs to push herself to 100% brain usage, because that's when the magic happens, apparently.
The film has a decent initial hook which plays out like an origin story for a regular superhero, but things don't go anywhere after that. Lucy chases down the other drugs, but her character rapidly becomes unstoppable, which doesn't lend well to showing a character struggling to succeed. There are plenty of gunfights and Matrix-like scenes of digital weirdness mixed with reality, but the show is just a veneer with no substance underneath.
The science espoused by Morgan Freeman's Professor Norman is a mishmash of facts bent with fiction, particularly the main premise of the story about the percentage of brain use in humans. Lucy's speech and demeanor become more robotic as her brain usage increases, but many of the characters have wooden dialog as well that is way too on the nose.
Verdict: The movie is missing a true struggle by its protagonist, and the ending goes nowhere. It's worth buying a ticket if you're just looking for a shallow film with flashy gunfights but not much substance underneath, and you can tolerate sketchy science.