As a young American ex-pat and party girl living in Taipei, Lucy (Scarlett Johannson) seems an unlikely candidate for the next leap in human evolution, but that’s just what she becomes. Poor Lucy’s numbskull boyfriend has handcuffed her to a briefcase of experimental narcotics and landed her in the clutches of a Korean crime lord (Min-sik Choi). She is swiftly press-ganged into a job as a drug mule, with a pouch of the mysterious blue substance surgically concealed in her abdomen. When the packet accidentally leaks, however, Lucy’s bloodstream is flooded with the drug, unlocking the untapped potential of her mind. Suddenly gifted with super-heroic perception, intelligence, and physical abilities, Lucy enlists the aid of a philosophizing neurologist (Morgan Freeman) and a Parisian police detective (Amr Waked) to preserve her godlike knowledge for future generations—before her amped-up metabolism burns itself out.
French director Luc Besson’s Lucy is premised on the curiously durable “humans only use 10% of their brain” myth, which was exploited most recently in 2011’s Limitless. However, conceptual triteness is only one of the new film’s problems. Early on, Lucy seems to promise at least some Tony Scott or Oliver Stone kookiness—behold the symbolic insert shots!—but the film quickly settles into the blandest of contemporary science-fiction conventions. The car chases, shootouts, and brief interludes of melodrama are all capably rendered, but the overall effect is underwhelming and anonymous. The film’s mangled science, meanwhile, is fatally distracting. A ludicrous concept can be forgivable if carried out with gusto, as in Besson’s own cartoonish cult marvel, The Fifth Element. Lucy’s premise is at least internally consistent, but the film’s understanding of neuroscience and evolutionary biology is so absurdly (and blithely) distorted that one can only gape in embarrassed disbelief.
Lucy opens in wide release in the St. Louis area on Friday, July 25.
