Review: Lucy

City Paper grade: B

First of all, the oft-repeated notion that humans only have access to 10% of our brains is a complete fallacy. Which means that Lucy, in which a baggie of experimental drugs explodes inside Scarlett Johansson’s bloodstream, is built on a foundation of utter nonsense – and it only gets exponentially sillier from there. This being a Luc Besson movie, increased brain power leads not to profound insights and scientific breakthroughs, but to a hypervisual spectacle involving high-speed car chases, shoot-outs with Taiwanese gangsters and the ability to manipulate reality like an iPad. None of it makes the slightest bit of sense, even with Morgan Freeman on hand to explain the film’s ludicrous science in his most somber tones; this is the kind of science that in a more rational world would motivate villagers with torches and pitchforks. Lucy is essentially a superhero origin story without even the internal logic of a comic book. Lucy’s abilities become essentially boundless, her main super power apparently being the ability to clear Besson’s mental warehouse of cool, context-free spectacle. Gun-toting villains are knocked unconscious en masse, floated helplessly to the ceiling, or trapped in a mime box (increasing one’s intelligence by the power of ten means never repeating your nifty telekinetic tricks from on situation to the next, naturally); time is scrolled backwards, straight through a face-to-face encounter with the heroine’s australopithecine namesake. Which is all to say that it’s ridiculous fun, but it might help to turn off about 90% of your brain before watching.