| For lots of reasons Scarlett Johansson is generally worth watching, she does like to vary her roles.
The film opens as Lucy (Scarlett) tries to end a brief assignation with Richard, an obviously dodgy drug-dealing cowboy, who wanted her to pass a case between him and a gangster situated in a nearby building. She doesn’t want to but he handcuffs her to the case, and she is swept away by some hefty Japanese gents.
The boss man is a truly unpleasant chap who gets her to open the case, hiding behind screens in case it’s a bomb. However it proves to be four large packets of a blue substance, which the gangsters insert within the bodies of four unwilling volunteers, including Lucy.
However Lucy’s drugs are dislodged when she gets a brutal kicking and they are dispersed into her bloodstream. It’s a drug designed to make humans use more of their brain capacity than the 10% which is allegedly the norm.
From then on, Lucy gets smarter as the percentage of her brain capacity she is using heads towards 100%. She’s unstoppable, she knows everything, she can do anything. The only thing she doesn’t seem to know is the time, when her mother asks her. You’d think she would have that ticking away in a corner of her mighty brain.
She certainly doesn’t acquire any compassion, a huge percentage of the characters in the film get shot and she shows no quiver of emotion. Morgan Freeman as a professor who knows all about the drug and the release of brain capacity, acts as a sort of explanatory voice-over.
While Scarlett is a riveting central presence, the film gradually becomes an exercise in graphics rather than a story. There’s no attempt to explain how using more of your brain can remove bullets from guns, bowl people over, acquire vast knowledge out of thin air…
It’s not a bad watch but it is as pointless a film as I can remember seeing.
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