Lucy - 3 stars

Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) is an American living in Taiwan.  Her most recent boyfriend talks her into delivering a briefcase to Mr. Jang, who captures her and forces her to become a drug mule.  When she accidentally ingests a large amount of this mysterious new drug, she begins to access more and more of her brain, making her into a super intelligent killing machine.

Meanwhile, Morgan Freeman is a professor who's been studying this exact kind of thing for over 20 years.  The movie keeps cutting back to him lecturing about the possibility of what we would be capable of if we could access more than 10 percent of our brains.

This is a crazy, wild movie.  The story is pretty simple, and I thought that was refreshing.  Basically we watch Lucy get captured, get in over her head, then start to kick the ass of everyone who put her in this predicament.  Director Luc Besson (Transporter, The Fifth Element) has a really interesting style.  As Lucy is walking into the villain's lair, Besson cuts away to nature footage of mountain lions stalking a gazelle.  Ok, we get it.  Lucy's the gazelle and these guys with guns are about to take her down.  It's a crazy choice, but I enjoyed it.

The movie is pretty ridiculous.  Lucy at first acts like a trained assassin, with deadly focus and able to beat up henchmen twice her size.  Then she starts getting telekinesis, able to control people and objects with her mind.  She can even manipulate computers, TVs and cell phones.  The movie doesn't bother to explain how (with no camera on her) she can make her face appear on the TV in Morgan Freeman's hotel room, but you just kind of have to go with it.  She has whatever powers the script requires her to have at any given moment.

I was enjoying this movie up until the last 10 minutes or so, when it goes into Transcendence territory.  She starts to mutate into some kind of computer / human hybrid that looks like the Trapper Keeper from South Park.  From there, it gets really crazy.  I have to give Besson points for being bold and taking the movie in the direction he did.  And at least the movie didn't end with a simple shootout or chase scene.

I'm giving this movie 3 stars but I'm questioning myself here.  I had a good time with it, but I don't think it's a very good movie.  Just a crazy, dumb one.  But I enjoyed myself, so there you go.  If you see it and hate it, I won't have any argument with you.