Lucy

A Luc Besson direction, Lucy is an English language French science fiction  action flick starring Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman, Amr Waked and Choi Min-sik. Shot in Taipei, Paris & New York the movie is about a woman who gains psychokinetic abilities from a nootropic drug being absorbed into her bloodstream.

Lucy is an American student in Taipei and gets tricked into delivering a suitcase to Korean mob boss & drug lord Mr. Jang at a hotel by a man she just started dating. While she waits at the lobby, the boyfriend is killed and she is taken up to Jang’s suite by his goons. The suitcase contains four large vials of a new synthetic drug called CPH4 and the goons have the vials surgically inserted into the abdomens of Lucy and 3 other unwitting drug mules who will deliver the drugs to various cities in Europe. Lucy is taken away to a warehouse and while in captivity, one of her captors kicks her hard in the stomach which releases a large quantity of the drug into her system.  As a result, she begins acquiring increasingly enhanced physical and mental capabilities, such as telepathy, telekinesis, mental time travel, and can choose not to feel pain or other discomforts, in addition to other abilities. Using her new found abilities, she dispatches her captors and escapes.

She goes to a hospital nearby and has a surgeon remove the bag of drugs at gunpoint and Lucy is told by the operating doctor of the volatile nature of the drug, based on a substance given to fetuses during prenatal development, and its destructive side-effects. Lucy then goes back to the hotel where Mr. Jang stays and kills a bunch of his men, stabs the mob boss’s hands and telepathically extracts the locations of all three drug mules from his brain. She then goes to her friend’s place and uses the internet to find out about & contact a well-known scientist and doctor, Professor Samuel Norman, whose research may be the key to saving her. She does this by controlling his phones, computers and tv to convince him of her genuineness. Lucy then contacts Paris police captain Pierre Del Rio and tells him about the remaining 3 bags of drugs that is being smuggled. During her flight to Paris Lucy starts to disintegrate when she takes a sip of champagne as her cells destabilize, due to the alcohol which makes her body inhospitable for cellular reproduction. She rushes to the bathroom and ingests more of the CPH4 which stabilizes her. Meanwhile the Korean drug gang had captured the 3 mules and taken the drugs from them.

As her powers grow Lucy is able to telepathically incapacitate armed police and members from the Korean drug gang and with the help of Del Rio she takes the 3 drugs back from them and hurries to meet Professor Norman, with whom she agrees to share everything she now knows, after he points out that the main point of life is to pass on knowledge. Jang and his men now in Paris have a shootout with the Paris police while Lucy speaks to Prof. Norman discusses the nature of time and life and how people’s humanity distorts their perceptions. She has his fellow scientists intravenously inject her with the contents of all three remaining bags of CPH4. She begins to metamorphose into a black substance which begins to spread over the computers and other devices in the lab and transform these into an unconventionally shaped, next generation supercomputer that will contain all of her enhanced knowledge of the universe. She then travels through space and time back into the past and sees the oldest discovered ancestor of mankind, implied to be Lucy, and touches fingertips with her. Jang then enters the lab, having killed off most the cops and his own men all dead, intending to kill the scientists and Lucy. Just before he shoots her Lucy reaches 100% of her cerebral capacity and disappears within the spacetime continuum, where she explains that everything is connected and existence is only proven through time. Left behind are only her clothes and the oddly shaped black supercomputer.

Jang is shot dead by an injured but still alive Del Rio and Professor Norman takes a black, monolithic flash drive offered by the advanced supercomputer before it disintegrates into dust. When Del Rio asks where Lucy is, he gets a message on his phone from her that say she is everywhere. As the film fades to black Lucy’s voice is heard stating, “Life was given to us a billion years ago. Now you know what to do with it.”

I think the movie has a lot of good points and has shot some of the scenes really well. As for the science, I guess they take a lot of liberties with it but that still makes for a good movie. I still have some issue with the plot. It was a box office success, grossing over $458 million against a budget of $40 million. 8 outta 10!

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