Lucy (2014)

Lucy is a 2014 French science fiction action film[5] written and directed by Luc Besson and produced by his wife Virginie Besson-Silla for his company EuropaCorp. The film was shot in Taipei, Paris, and New York City. It stars Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman, Choi Min-sik, and Amr Waked. Johansson portrays the titular character, a woman who gains psychokinetic abilities when a nootropic drug is absorbed into her bloodstream.

The film was released on July 25, 2014, and became a box office success,[6] grossing more than $463 million, eleven times the budget of $40 million. It received positive, but also polarizing, critical reviews. Although praise was given for its themes, visuals, and Johansson's performance, a number of critics found the plot nonsensical, especially its focus on the ten percent of the brain myth and resulting abilities.

25-year-old American Lucy is studying in Taipei, Taiwan and is tricked into working as a drug mule by her new boyfriend Richard for a Korean mob boss and drug lord. Lucy delivers a briefcase to Mr. Jang supposedly containing paperwork, but it actually contains four packets of CPH4, a highly valuable synthetic drug.

After seeing Richard shot and killed, she is captured and a bag of the drug is forcibly sewn into her abdomen to transport the drug for sale in Europe. While Lucy is in captivity, one of her captors kicks her in the stomach, breaking the bag and releasing a large quantity of the drug into her system. As a result, she acquires increasingly enhanced physical and mental capabilities, such as telepathy, telekinesis, mental time travel, and the ability not to feel pain. Using her new abilities, she kills her captors and escapes.

Lucy travels to the nearby Tri-Service General Hospital to get the bag of drugs removed from her abdomen. Lucy is told by the operating doctor that natural CPH4 is produced in minute quantities by pregnant women during their sixth week of pregnancy to provide fetuses with the energy to develop. 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 the three remaining drug mules from his brain.

Lucy begins researching her condition and contacts scientist Samuel Norman, whose research may be the key to saving her. After Lucy speaks with Norman 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. To stave off her disintegration, Lucy consumes more of the drug. With the help of Del Rio, Lucy recovers the rest of the drugs. Meeting Norman and his colleagues, she agrees to share everything she now knows as the main point of life is to pass on knowledge, something for which she now possesses an infinite capability.

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 changes into a black substance which begins spreading over computers and other electronic objects in the lab, transforming them into an unconventionally shaped, next-generation supercomputer. She mentally begins a spacetime journey into the past, eventually reaching the oldest discovered ancestor of mankind, implied to be Lucy. She touches fingertips with her, then goes all the way to the beginning of time and witnesses the Big Bang. Meanwhile, Jang enters the lab and points a gun at Lucy's head. He shoots, but by then Lucy has disappeared, moving into the spacetime continuum. Only her clothes and the black supercomputer are left behind.

Del Rio enters and fatally shoots Jang. Norman takes a black flash drive offered by the supercomputer, after which it disintegrates. Del Rio asks Norman where Lucy is, immediately after which Del Rio's cell phone sounds and he sees a text message: "I am everywhere." Lucy's voice is then heard stating "Life was given to us a billion years ago. Now you know what to do with it."