Lucy

If anyone follows I Fucking Love Science on Facebook probably knows that the premise of director/writer Luc Besson's new film is based on myths. Human beings don't really only use ten percent of their brain, just like they don't exclusively use right or left sides of it. But Besson is terrific at creating strong female characters like La Femme Nikita, Léon: The Professional, and The Fifth Element, that it's worth just forgetting those little nitpicking facts and just enjoy the ride.

Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) a college student living in Taipei, Taiwan is trapped into delivering a case handcuffed to her wrist by a bar picked up boyfriend of a week. Suddenly she is confronted by Korean gangster Mr. Jang (Oldboy's Choi Min-sik) who turns her into a drug mule by putting the packages of blue crystals in the case into her stomach. Three other mules are also used and they are put on planes to various locations. The panicked Lucy finds herself chained to a wall by Asian bad guys who beat her up, breaking the drugs into her body. The new compound unleashes her brain potential and firing at 20% capacity she manages to escape her captors and look for answer to her new found powers.

Morgan Freeman plays Professor Norman and expert in the study of neuroscience. Lucy contacts him in Paris convincing him by her abilities. She also goes in search for Mr. Jang to find out what happened to the rest of the packages and mules. The drugs which Mr. Jang was hoping to profit from in Europe turns out to be a synthetic CPH4, which supposedly is naturally produced in pregnant women for their developing fetus. Obviously whoever created the synthetic never tested the drug beyond it's recreational use and nothing we have to worry about in this movie. Lucy helps the cops in Paris with the assistance of Detective Del Rio (Amr Waked). But Mr. Jang is also tracking his mules and soon he's in Paris too.

Besson litters the film with little science factoid and scenes like first early humanoid primate Lucy. There's amusing scenes of how innocent Lucy is feeling by flashes of cheetahs running down prey. The story telling and action are way over the top, but in this case it works. Johansson easily shows her fear as a woman caught in the wrong place at the wrong time then into a person so evolved that she loses all her empathy and personality. The exposition of the scientific premise of what is happening to Lucy is somewhat dense and supplemented by educational asides of scenes but it doesn't distract from Lucy being able to knock everyone out or make them float in the air. Johansson already rocks as her superhero avatar Black Widow in the Avenger's series. So it's easy to accept her as a super human in a female centric action film that doesn't pander to the typical kick@ss in high heels.
(Review by reesa)