This ridiculous, highly watchable, at points startlingly psychedelic action thriller is probably Luc Besson’s best film since ‘Léon’ (which isn’t saying a great deal). Riffing on her recent performance in ‘Under the Skin’, Scarlett Johansson plays Lucy, an American student in the Taiwanese capital Taipei, who is forced to act as a drug mule for a group of brutal Korean gangsters. But when the powder she’s carrying leaks into her bloodstream, Lucy finds herself acquiring strange superheroic powers. Is she going mad, or becoming God?
‘Lucy’ is not about to win any prizes from Mensa. Besson hauls in a bemused-looking Morgan Freeman as a neuroscientist in a vain effort to give legitimacy to the film’s pseudo-scientific plotline (wheeling out the old ‘we only use 10 percent of our brains’ myth). But crammed as it is with snarling foreign villains, feisty punch-ups and a peculiar habit of intercutting frames of random wildlife footage into the main action, this isn’t quite like any other blockbuster you’ll see this year – for better or worse.