Quartile rating: 7/10 · 2 ratings
Lucy is a slick, stylish Luc Besson sci-fi action film that squanders its intriguing premise on pseudoscientific nonsense about unlocking brain capacity. Scarlett Johansson is committed but the character arc strips away any emotional investment as she becomes increasingly robotic. The cinematography has Besson's trademark kinetic energy with some memorable sequences, but the plot rapidly devolves into incoherence. The concept of cognitive transcendence gives it some novelty, though it borrows heavily from Limitless and 2001 without matching either. The ending—Lucy disperses into the universe and texts 'I AM EVERYWHERE'—is memorably absurd but ultimately unsatisfying as a narrative conclusion.