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How many times when you were growing up did one of your parents give you one of those looks and say, “Use your head,” the statement with, you know, that tone? Yeah, it stuck with me, too, that order to wrap my brain around said situation and use all of my thinking ability to attain the best result possible. Did I always listen? Nope. Did everything always work out when I applied myself? No again. That brings us to Lucy, the film written and directed by Luc Besson that’s based entirely on the science that humans haven gotten so far in this chain of evolution by using only 10 percent of their brain’s capacity. It starts with two tales barreling toward each other. We have title character Lucy, played with great might by Scarlett Johansson. At the start, she’s talking with a crumb bum boyfriend she’s met a week in Taipei, and he’s trying to talk her into delivering a briefcase for him to a Chinese businessman in a skyscraper. Her wits tell her it’s a bad idea, so dirtbag handcuffs the briefcase to her wrist, pushes her toward the front desk and waves from outside the glass door.

Her instincts were correct, and a bad trip begins. We also have Professor Norman, a researcher played on brain capacity and how short mammals come in reaching it played with his usual dignity and smarts by Morgan Freeman, lecturing to interested scientists and such in Paris. Really, Johansson’s Lucy and Freeman’s Norman could have been the only two people in the film. Sure, Besson has written in and directed a bunch of Chinese bad guys who get their hands on a synthetic version the chemical that babies use in that first wonderful explosion of development, and the accident that causes Lucy to become the smartest person ever in a hurry, and a band of French police who try to protect her from those marauding bad guys. Of those, Min-sik Choi as extremely evil businessman Mr. Jang and Amr Waked as extremely intrepid detective Pierre Del Rio are the best.