Lucy (2014)

Lucy Movie - Scarlett Johansson

Taglines: The average person uses 10% of their brain capacity. Imagine what she could do with 100%.

It was supposed to be a simple job. All Lucy had to do was deliver a mysterious briefcase to Mr. Jang. But immediately Lucy is caught up in a nightmarish deal where she is captured and turned into a drug mule for a new and powerful synthetic drug. When the bag she is carrying inside of her stomach leaks, Lucy’s body undergoes unimaginable changes that unlocks her mind’s full potential 100%. With her new-found powers, Lucy turns into a merciless warrior intent on getting back at her captors. She receives invaluable help from Professor Norman, the leading authority on the human mind, and French police captain Pierre Del Rio.

Lucy is a 25-year-old American woman living and studying in Taipei, Taiwan. She is tricked into working as a drug mule by her new boyfriend, whose employer, Mr. Jang, is a Korean mob boss and drug lord. Lucy delivers a briefcase to Mr. Jang containing a highly valuable synthetic drug called CPH4. After seeing her boyfriend shot and killed, she is captured and a bag of the drug is forcibly sewn into her abdomen and that of three other drug mules who will also transport the drug for sales in Europe.

Lucy Movie - Scarlett Johansson

While Lucy is in captivity, one of her captors kicks her in the stomach, breaking the bag, releasing a large quantity of the drug into her system. As a result, she begins acquiring increasingly enhanced physical and mental capabilities, such as telepathy, telekinesis, mental time travel, and can choose not to feel pain or other discomforts, in addition to other abilities. She kills off her present captors and escapes.

Lucy travels to the nearby Tri-Service General Hospital to get the bag of drugs removed from her abdomen. The bag is successfully removed, and Lucy is told by the operating doctor of the volatile nature of the drug, based on a substance given to fetuses during prenatal development, and its destructive side-effects. Sensing her growing physical and mental abilities, Lucy returns to Mr. Jang’s hotel, kills his bodyguards, assaults Mr. Jang, and telepathically extracts the locations of all three drug mules from his brain.

At her shared apartment, Lucy begins researching her condition and contacts a well-known scientist and doctor, Professor Samuel Norman, whose research may be the key to saving her. After Lucy speaks with the professor and provides proof of her developed abilities, she flies to Paris and contacts a local police captain, Pierre Del Rio, to help her find the remaining three packets of the drug. During the plane ride she starts to disintegrate as her cells destabilize from consuming a sip of champagne, which made her body inhospitable for cellular reproduction.

Lucy Movie - Scarlett Johansson

Only by consuming more CPH4 is she able to prevent her total disintegration. Her powers continue to grow, leaving her able to telepathically incapacitate armed police and members from the Korean drug gang. With the help of Del Rio, Lucy recovers the drug and hurries to meet Professor Norman, with whom she agrees to share everything she now knows, after he points out that the main point of life is to pass on knowledge. Jang and the mob also want the drug and a gunfight ensues with the French police.

In the professor’s lab, Lucy discusses the nature of time and life and how people’s humanity distorts their perceptions. At her urging, she is intravenously injected with the contents of all three remaining bags of CPH4. Her body begins to metamorphose into a black substance, spreading over computers and other objects in the lab, as she transforms these into an unconventionally shaped, next generation supercomputer that will contain all of her enhanced knowledge of the universe.

She then begins a spacetime journey into the past, eventually reaching the oldest discovered ancestor of mankind, implied to be Lucy, and touches fingertips with her. Meanwhile, back in the lab, after an M136 AT4 anti-tank weapon destroys the door, Mr. Jang enters and points a gun at Lucy’s head from behind, intending to kill her. He shoots, but in an instant before the bullet strikes, Lucy reaches 100% of her cerebral capacity and disappears within the space time continuum, where she explains that everything is connected and existence is only proven through time. Only her clothes and the oddly shaped black supercomputer are left behind.

Del Rio then enters and fatally shoots Mr. Jang. Professor Norman takes a black, monolithic flash drive offered by the advanced supercomputer created by Lucy’s body before the machine disintegrates to dust. Del Rio asks Professor Norman where Lucy is, immediately after which, Del Rio’s cell phone sounds and he sees a text message: “I AM EVERYWHERE.” With an overhead shot, Lucy’s voice is heard stating, “Life was given to us a billion years ago. Now you know what to do with it.”

Lucy Movie Poster

Lucy

Directed by: Luc Besson
Starring: Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman, Min-sik Choi, Analeigh Tipton, Amr Waked
Screenplay by: Luc Besson
Production Design by: Hugues Tissandier
Cinematography by: Thierry Arbogast
Costume Design by: Olivier Bériot
Set Decoration by: Evelyne Tissandier
Music by: Eric Serra
MPAA Rating: R for strong violence, disturbing images, and sexuality.
Studio: Universal Pictures
Release Date: July 25th, 2014

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