Scarlett Johansson’s R-Rated Sci-Fi Thriller Is Sexy, Kinetic, And Brutal

By Robert Scucci
| Published 1 hour ago

By now, the myth that we only use 10 percent of our brains has been proven false, but when it’s used well as a movie trope, I’m willing to embrace the lie. In the case of 2014’s Lucy, they refer to potential brain usage as “cerebral capacity,” allowing Scarlett Johansson to lean into the idea that if she’s able to tap her full potential, the world as we know it would be forever altered. Often compared to 2011’s Limitless, Lucy occupies similar thematic territory to the Bradley Cooper-starring film. The distinction that needs to be clocked, however, is how reaching full cerebral capacity is handled.

Limitless tells a story about how one man’s endless cognitive abilities can only serve him so much if he becomes hooked on a substance that’s difficult to synthesize, potentially leading to his downfall. Lucy, on the other hand, takes a more global approach to its storytelling, suggesting that humanity operates at 10 percent cerebral capacity because mankind isn’t meant to see, hear, feel, and experience so much. Too much of everything happening all at once could send us back to the stone age because the entirety of the universe is beyond the reasonable scope of human comprehension.

Lucy grapples with this notion of evolution through its titular protagonist, who, once she passes a certain threshold of sensory perception, realizes that no human being should possess that much mental power because it’s simply too much to handle. What’s more, if that kind of cognizance falls into the wrong hands, there’s no telling how damaging it could be to our species.

From Drug Mule To Singularity

Scarlett Johansson’s Lucy finds herself in a predicament when her boyfriend sets her up in what is, by all measures, a nightmare scenario. He forces her to unknowingly deliver a briefcase full of a synthetic drug known as CPH4 to a South Korean drug lord named Mr. Jang (Choi Min-sik). Mr. Jang’s full intentions aren’t made clear at first, but we do know that he’s trying to transport the highly potent and extremely valuable drug all over Europe, sewing bags of the substance into the stomachs of his couriers so they can smuggle it across various borders undetected. What Mr. Jang doesn’t plan for, though, is Lucy getting kicked in the stomach, causing the bag to rupture and leak into her body.

Suddenly supercharged by the drug, Lucy quickly realizes that it’s made her super intelligent. From this point forward, we get scene breaks that reveal what percentage of her brain she’s using as she seeks answers about her condition, leading her to Professor Samuel Norman (Morgan Freeman), who’s devoted his life to studying the potential of the human brain. This all seems convenient, but junk science aside, it tracks. Lucy’s physicality, and the choices she makes, work in lockstep with her increased brain power as more of the drug titrates into her system.

Professor Norman has no clue what will happen when Lucy’s cerebral capacity hits 100 percent, but he’s willing to risk everything to help her find out since she’s already well on her way to reaching that target anyway. As they grapple with the science and its global implications, Mr. Jang closes in on Lucy, who’s hightailing it to Paris in a last-ditch effort to procure more bags of CPH4. Possessing superhuman abilities at this point, anybody who gets in Lucy’s way is pretty much signing their own death notice as her intelligence, awareness, and reflexes continue to increase exponentially.

Along the way, there are philosophical debates in Lucy. The running theme is that human beings only use a fraction of their brain because there’s no reasonable way to live with infinite knowledge of the totality of everything. At least not at this current phase in our species’ evolution. Lucy knows this, because she knows everything, and it’s up to her to figure out how to pass her knowledge on before she collapses under the existential weight of knowing everything about everything.

Similar To Limitless, But Stays In Its Own Lane

The best part about Lucy is how every single story intersects. Much of the first act highlights Lucy coming to terms with what’s happening to her. All of the junk science necessary to tell the story is laid out by Morgan Freeman’s Professor Norman. We literally get the lecture hall treatment as he discusses his research to his class, then we get smash cuts back to Johansson leveling up, realizing that Professor Norman’s research is instrumental to her evolution, forcing her to track him down and allowing the stories to intersect.

While these threads converge, we’re met with B-roll of nature, the animal kingdom, and the universe, allowing viewers to subconsciously absorb the implied scope of what 100 percent cerebral capacity in a human being would mean.

Once things really get cooking, there’s plenty of stylized action to keep the story engaging because Lucy becomes a powerful being, possessing telekinetic abilities that play well off her antagonists when they realize what kind of power they accidentally unleashed. With a flick of the wrist, several armed henchmen get tossed into the ceiling, for example. It’s a lot of fun to watch Scarlett Johansson shift from a damsel in distress to the ballsy heroine whose brain possesses magnitudes of information that could explain the very origin of intelligent life as we know and presently understand it. It’s even more fun when she has to make crucial, split-second decisions in order to subdue the very dangerous people who are trying to capture her. 

The question, though, is what she’s going to do with that information. Will she go on the ultimate power trip, destroying everything in her wake? Or will she use her powers to educate the masses, allowing humanity to reach its next evolutionary step? You can find out by firing up Lucy on Netflix. If you’re worried about this movie insulting your intelligence, don’t. None of this is real. But it’s still fun to play pretend every once in a while.