Overview
A woman, accidentally caught in a dark deal, turns the tables on her captors and transforms into a merciless warrior evolved beyond human logic.
Scarlett Johansson plays the titular Lucy, a woman who accidentally gets entangled in a drug trafficking deal – and before she knows it, she is a mule herself with half a kilo of CPH4 implanted in her body. As things go wrong, she develops super-human skills, beyond anyone’s imagination…
Starting from a flawed and debunked premise (‘people only use 10% of their brain power’), it asks the viewer to be extremely forgiving as it builds an extrapolated ‘logic’ that if we could maybe use 20% or even 40% or 60% of our cerebral capacity, we could not only think for ourselves, we could start to control every cell in our body, and then in any other living thing, anywhere on the planet, and control time, and space, and shapeshift, and and and… Even though eloquently ‘explained’ by Morgan Freeman as Professor Normann, it is hard to buy into the core ‘reasoning’ so it is best not to even try.
As a brainless action movie it sometimes delivers but never excels. The cinematography and visuals are often pretty good, but Luc Besson’s directing isn’t on the money this time: there are various scenes where Johansson is simply not on-point – either well over-acting (in particular in the early scenes in the elevator and the drug lord’s office) or disconnected from the action (in particular a scene where she has some of the baddies literally flying comes to mind).
And the finale is just silly. Trying to be deep and meaningful, it is more laughable instead.
Watchable but make sure you do not engage more than 1% of your cerebral capacity or else your brain will start to hurt.
4/10 for effort.