Normally, I like movies in which Scarlett Johansson appears.  There also seems to be a divide in her career.  Early on, it was films like Lost in Translation (2004) or The Nanny Diaries (2007), ones with a heart and a message.  Then she got the role of Natasha Romanov in Iron Man 2 (2010), a character known to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) as Black Window, and she started doing action.  It became schlock with Lucy (2014).  Because of what I said early on, I remember looking forward to this one.  I had gotten used to her being a superhero, so this one seemed like it could be interesting.  How wrong I was.  It starts out simply enough, as you will see.  About a quarter of the way through, it is like the script gets highjacked by madmen that all have ideas and demand to see them put into the what proceeds.  Watching it again, I also realized that this is also a great movie for me to flex my Catholic muscles on, so get ready.

Before we meet Lucy (Scarlett Johansson), we meet Lucy, or somebody who could be Lucy.  This is the name given by researchers to the oldest known human remains found to date.  By the way, the movie is set in modern times, not three and a half million years ago, though I would not call this opening scene a flashback in a cinematic sense.  Confused yet?  Good.  Our Lucy is an American living in Taipei, Taiwan.  Her boyfriend, Richard (Pilou Asbæk), is a drug runner for the South Korean mafia.  Because he is in trouble with their organization, he is trying to get her to make his next delivery, claiming that it is merely paperwork.  She does not appear to trust him, and tries repeatedly to get out of doing as he asks.  She is about to walk away for good when he handcuffs the briefcase to her wrist.  Having no other alternative, she goes inside and asks for Mr. Jang (Choi Min-sik) as instructed.  This is when things begin to go badly for her, not so much the  us viewers . . . yet.  What I mean to say is that you have sympathy for her as she watches in horror as Richard is murdered outside and she is taken hostage by criminals.  She is then brought upstairs and ordered to open the case, though nobody seems to know what is in it.  When she does gaze upon its contents, they are four plastic packets of a new illicit substance called CPH4.  It has the ability for its user to access more of the brain than the mere roughly ten percent that we currently utilize . . . supposedly.  There are a number of flaws with this assertion, but we will leave that discussion to science.  As this takes place, on the other side of the world, Professor Samuel Norman (Morgan Freeman) is giving a lecture on how we humans use our brain.  There is also a bunch of stuff in here about evolution which is all science-sounding, but hard to follow.  Among his theories is what mankind would do if we were able to put more of our brain to work, citing dolphins as the superior species in this regard since they have sonar in their heads.  I guess this relates to Lucy because she is about to be force to become a drug mule, with a kilo of CPH4 sewn into her abdomen?  Perhaps the uses will develop head sonar, too?  She is then ordered to travel to another country (which one, who knows?) where she will have the package removed and hopefully given her freedom.  Until then, she is kept in a prison cell.  In her confinement she receives yet another beating, which results in the bag inside her bursting.  It is at this point that the movie becomes broken.  Up until then, there had been a lot of talk about what people could do by using more of their brain, which, again, is theorized by Professor Norman.  The feats that we see Lucy do figuratively and literally defy explanation.  Therefore, I will not bother.  Suffice to say, she escapes her captivity and wonders what to do next.  She goes to a hospital and has what remains of the drugs taken out of her abdomen, calling her mother as surgery is performed on her.  Oh, yeah, and she does this at gun point.  Next, she returns to the apartment she had been sharing with another American student, and begins scanning the internet for scientists that might help her with her growing condition.  Why she needs this since she already seems to know everything, I could not tell you.  Anyway, she arranges to meet Professor Norman in Paris in order to show him the extent of her advancing faculties.  At the same time, she contacts Officer Pierre de Rio (Amr Waked) of the Paris police to warn the authorities of other mules like her arriving in Europe, information she obtained by reading Mr. Jong’s mind.  Right.  She flies to Paris because she has set up for him the capture of the others in order to take their drugs.  On the flight, she begins to dissolve, for some reason, but is fixed by taking more CPH4. Anyway, shortly after landing she meets up with Officer del Rio, taking him on a wild ride through the streets of Paris to get to the hospital where the others are about to have surgery.  She also has to telekinetically deal with some of Mr. Jong’s goons, but whatever.  Finally, it is on to a laboratory where Professor Norman has brought together a team to study her.  Her goal is to get to one hundred percent brain function because, you know, why not?  With Officer de Rio’s men engaging in a battle with Mr. Jong and company, she gets to this goal with a whole bunch of science fiction nonsense occurring.  A bloodied Mr. Jong is about to kill Lucy before she vanishes, leaving some kind of supercomputer in her wake.  The last we see of “her” is Officer de Rio getting a text saying that she is “everywhere.”

The text at the end of Lucy is meant to be from the title character in answer to Officer del Rio asking aloud where she is.  This is only one instance of many in this movie that had my Catholic alarm bells going off, hence there is a lot to unpack.  Never mind the insanity.  Why anything happens seems to be a mystery even to the movie since we see Professor Norman say that he has no idea when somebody asks him what would happen if a human used more of their brain.  This seems to be a signal to the people behind the camera to display anything they want whether or not it makes sense.  What I do not want to do here, though, is give the impression that Catholicism is anti-science.  I recently saw a meme that showed an atheist making fun of Christians for their tiny thoughts, and then below it is a picture of the Catholic priest who first theorized the Big Bang Theory.  Go ahead and look it up if you do not believe me.  Speaking of science, a non-Catholic thought kept barging into my mind as the events kept compounding upon themselves in their utter incredulity: it is not true that we only use ten percent of our brains.  God created every cell of our being, and every bit of it has a function.  Does it all need to be guided consciously for some purpose of ours?  However, the biggest idea that collided with my Catholic-ness is the notion of what makes us human.  At one point, Lucy transcends her humanity as she grows, which one could argue makes her become god-like.  In any case, she begins to be able to do the kinds of things that we might typically associate with God.  In a broader sense, this underscores the notion that if God were not real, man would have to invent him.  We have characters throughout culture like Lucy because of our supposed need to go beyond ourselves.  Yet, where this comparison breaks down completely is the fact that God is not unfeeling like she becomes.  God is love, and that is a force that is missing from this movie.  This is the more important reason why it is terrible, other than being incomprehensible plot-wise.

Lucy is an example of a movie that is so bad that . . . well, no, it is just plain bad.  There are some interesting philosophical nuggets, but they are subsumed into the muck and mire of things happening that defy any form of logic.  I would not watch this one again, but I am glad I reviewed it.