Lucy

Luc Besson's Lucy is an action sci-fi drama starring Scarlett Johansson and Morgan Freeman. Johansson plays Lucy, a woman thrown into the middle of a drug war in Tapei with a Korean syndicate.  In the process of being forced to be a drug mule, she injest an overdose of this new experimental drug and quickly gains the capacity to expand the limits of the human brain.  Freeman plays a scientist who happens to study the limits of the mind and so becomes integral to the journey of Lucy.  The film is definetely a Besson film with his signature pace with action and story, camera look, and Asian influences. Adding a science fiction element on the level of The Matrix was very refreshing.  But it is also this over the top element embedded in the storyline of Lucy being pursued by the gangsters and international police, that is also it's undoing. At times, it is many of Besson's best movies and their urgency that we see within the film. Think The Transporter, La Femme Nikita, or Colombiana and if you've seen those films, than you've seen much of Lucy already.  Certainly a better actress in Johansson and an authenticity with Freeman were upgrades.  Yet the bombastic action starts to pale and get more cartoonish noticeably as the end of the film nears.  By this time, and as admittedly entertaining as it is, it's hard to decipher whether your looking at a typical Besson picture being overshadowed with an episode of the Neal deGrasse Tyson's Cosmos.  The character Lucy in exploring the mind and universe culminates all too neatly and comically in the end, obviously yanking us back and reminding us that it's just an action movie with a big flash drive.