Not up to Besson's high standards

Rating: 6/10 (3 May 2015)

Luc Besson is one of our modern auteurs, with films like Leon, The Fifth Element, La Femme Nikita, or Taken. In the Lucy tale, an innocent woman is captured by drug lords who stash a developmental hormone drug in her belly to smuggle it into Europe. Then they make the mistake of kicking her and releasing the drug into her. She turns into a superhuman who can use much more of her brainpower than you or I, and initially kills the drug lords like flies, but then realizes she has a bigger mission.
Lucy has an interesting premise: what if the human mind is somehow capable of much more, including telekinesis, levitation, and all those things we occasionally dream we could do. The film posits that current science of the brain is not even scratching the surface, and consciousness can control matter. Fine.
The problem is that it portrays current science incorrectly at a level that will make any educated high school student cringe. Nothing is wrong with the premise of the film, but if something transcends our current knowledge, at least present current knowledge as we know it correctly at the high school level. (1) Life arose well over a billion years ago. (2) The 10% brain thing is pop psychology of the 1950s. It's 2014, Luc! Etc. And if high school students will giggle (like the ones who sat next to me in the theatre), imagine someone who knows a bit about the current state-of-the-art in neuroscience!
Moral: If you're going to use bad science, as opposed to extrapolate good science, at least don't flash a %-value on the screen every 10 minutes as a reminder !
La Femme Nikita is just a much better film in the same genre: a woman turned into a deadly weapon that goes out of the control of her handlers. Lucy is a return to familiar fare for Besson, but he got it right the first time around, and ultimately fails here. If mathematics does not describe the secrets of the universe, how come you can summarize Lucy's important knowledge on a USB memory stick? That's a math-based device.
The film features many interesting ideas and shots, like the cutting between Lucy/druglords and a gazelle/cheetah; or the scene about cell division, sex and birth, although the religious crowd will not like the interposition of animal and human behavior. And of course there is the Lucy that started it all in East Africa, whom modern Lucy gets to meet once she controls time. For these and other good ideas, the film still gets a 6. But for the lame science (spewed with laughable authority by Morgan Freeman), lame dinosaur action, stupid plot holes that don't belong in a film with high aspirations, and the "Lucy is the Matrix" ending, that's as high as it goes. I recommend seeing La Femme Nikita again instead.