I watched Lucy (2014) the other day, one a whim, and rather liked it. It was directed by Luc Besson, who also directed Léon: The Professional, The Fifth Element, and Valarian and the City of a Thousand Planets, each of which I liked. But I didn’t know that when I decided to watch. Netflix brought it up on my feed and it looked interesting.
Here's the beginning of Wikipedia’s plot description:
Lucy is an American studying in Taipei. Her new boyfriend Richard coerces her into delivering a briefcase containing four bags of the highly valuable synthetic drug CPH4 to Mr. Jang, a South Korean drug lord, at Regent Taipei.
After witnessing Richard being shot dead, she is captured and forced to become a drug mule. One bag of the drug is sewn into her abdomen for transport to Europe. However, she is kicked in the stomach, breaking the bag and releasing a large quantity of the drug into her system. She acquires enhanced physical and mental capabilities, such as telepathy, telekinesis, mental time travel, and negated emotions; she also ceases to feel pain. Using her new abilities, she kills her captors and escapes.
Lucy’s powers grow and grow until at the end she’s zipping backward in time until she’s finger to finger with an ape, a scene that’s obviously meant to invoke two very different images: Michaelangelo’s God and Adam touching in the Sistine Chapel, and the opening of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. There’s a similar scene where Lucy touches and organoid extension of a new (type of) super-duper-computer that’s come into being. Her name, obviously, is reminiscent of Lucy, the Australopithecus specimen, who was named after “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” which acronymizes to “LSD.” Have I told you too much?
It's that kind of movie. Very “mystical” and fantastic, but also a crime movie. Very fast and exciting. Boom! Boom! Boom!
It’s plotted out as a convergence. On the one hand we have Lucy’s adventures as she deals with the criminals who implanted the drugs in her belly and rushes halfway around the world to meat Samuel Norman, a neuroscientist who’s theorized about her capabilities. The movie comes to a climax when she makes her way to him, along with those criminals, and we get the mystical whizbang pizzazz where human Lucy travels to time to touch ape Lucy on her way back to the big bang and that super-computer.
The pseudo-causal details of this don’t matter. They’re all silly. But it looks good and is a lot of fun.
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