"Fans of Johansson's patented flat affect — put to better use in Under the Skin and Marvel's The Avengers — will enjoy Lucy, as too will the kid from your college dorm who ate too many mushrooms that one night. … Nothing much happens in Lucy — the plot on a pinhead: Scarlett Johansson gets roped into being a drug mule for a crime boss in Taipei, and after ingesting her parcel becomes a near deity — but since it's shorter than some commutes, who cares? This is probably a spoiler, but in a movie as confusing and downright weird as Lucy, spoilers are relative."

"Scarlett Johansson - Lucy"

"Lucy cleverly capitalizes on Johansson's ascent by placing her in the lead of a movie that takes the best elements of Limitless and The Matrix, and develops them into a unique action property."

"There’s a refreshing lack of bull in Lucy. Two minutes into the movie, the titular heroine, a twenty-something raver (Scarlett Johansson) is forced by a d-bag boyfriend (looking like the world’s worst Bono imitator, complete with red sunglasses and cowboy hat) to deliver a mysterious package to a Taipei crime lord. Five minutes in, she’s sliced up, stuffed with the package’s contents — a potent new mind-expanding synthetic drug — and turned into an unwilling mule. Ten minutes in, a kick to the stomach leaks the drugs into her system, rebooting Lucy into a real-world, super-blonde version of Neo from The Matrix. It’s a superhero story that tells the origin tale with an economy and conciseness that’s been lacking through this whole movie summer. Actually, it’s been lacking in these types of movies for a while. Remember how long the Ang Lee version of Hulk took to get to the action? Yeah, Lucy presents the exact opposite. After that quick introduction, Lucy stays pedal-to-the floor for all of its brisk 89 minutes, as the newly-empowered Lucy sets off to track down the rest of the cartel’s unwilling mules, all while the drug unlocks more and more of her brain’s potential (with the bad guys chasing after her). … She busts out and guns down her captors like Rambo. She mind-melds into a brain like Spock. She flings around the cartel bad guys like Magneto, feels living life-forces like Luke Skywalker, drives like Jason Bourne and even jumps through time and space like Doctor Who. Who needs Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, Hawkeye and the rest of the Avengers? Lucy could demolish them all, and probably Batman and Superman and Wonder Woman, too. She could take care of the next two movie summers with no trouble at all."

"Morgan Freeman - Professor Norman"

"Set five minutes into the future, Lucy is about the birth of a new kind of superhero. With Scarlett Johansson playing our eponymous ninja with mental superpowers, there's a lot of fantastic action here. … Director Luc Besson is a genius when it comes to visual flair and action, so the action scenes (when we get them) are great. And the first act of the film is possibly one of my favorite superhero origin stories ever. Lucy is a college student in Taipei whose loser boyfriend tricks her into delivering a mysterious suitcase to an even more mysterious group of Taiwan mafia guys. Of course, they immediately kill her boyfriend and then drag her to a hotel room full of other dead people. This whole sequence is fantastic, with Lucy totally out of her depth and Besson interspersing the action with weird nature footage of animals eating each other. The tone is frenetic, ironic, and ultra-comic booky. … For anyone who listened to Johansson's sultry AI voice in Her, the role she plays in Lucy will feel like a reprise — except instead of being a machine who convinces us that she's human, here she's a human who is slowly becoming a machine. The more of her brain she uses, the more she needs to merge with a computer. Eventually, we learn that her destiny is to become an AI of sorts. Which means that she's one of those superheroes with an expiration date, able to kick ass for only a short time before evolving into something incomprehensible and irritatingly mystical. It's this plot point that drives the movie, flailingly, toward an attempt at having a grander message than "kick ass, warp reality, and look damn good.""

"Johansson plays Lucy as a mouthy hanger-on who’s transformed into a ninja Carrie White in The Matrix. Chinese assassins move fast, but she moves faster. She’s not, I should point out, a vigilante avenger. She’s beyond human emotion. It’s true that someone accessing, say, 50 percent of her brain probably has more cerebral things to do with her time. But in a way, this is cerebral. She throws one glance at the advancing hordes and it’s a bloody Busby Berkeley ballet of flying bodies."

"I think it is such an interesting imagination Luc has going on there … We always think and hear terms like, "We only use 10 percent of our brains" but did anyone ever imagine what it would be like if you could use more? So here comes Luc imaging what could happen if you could use more … With Luc Besson you have a knock-down, drag-out action film but then you have one that also makes you feel and think … It gives a little spark to your imagination to say "What if? What would I do? How would it be?""

"Choi Min-sik - Mr. Jang"

"One neuron, you're alive. Two neurons you're moving. And with movement, interesting things begin to happen."

"Now let's examine a special case, the only living being that uses its brain better than us: the dolphin. It is estimated that this incredible animal uses 20% of its cerebral capacity. In particular, this allows it to have an echolocation system that is more efficient than any sonar ever invented by mankind. But the dolphin did not invent the sonar — it developed it, naturally. And this is the crucial part of our philosophical reflection we have today: can we therefore conclude that humans are more concerned with "having" than "being"?"

"Life was given to us a billion years ago. Now you know what to do with it."

"And it is going through time that seems to be also the only real purpose of each of the cells in our bodies. To achieve that aim, the mass of the cells that make up earthworms and human beings has only two solutions—be immortal or to reproduce."

"Every cell knows and talks to every other cell. They exchange a thousand bits of information between themselves per second. Cells join together forming a joint web of communication, which in turn forms matter. Cells get together, take on one form, deform, reform — makes no difference, they're all the same. Humans consider themselves unique, so they've rooted their whole theory of existence on their uniqueness. "One" is their unit of "measure" — but it's not. All social systems we've put into place are a mere sketch: "one plus one equals two", that's all we've learned, but one plus one has never equaled two — there are in fact no numbers and no letters, we've codified our existence to bring it down to human size, to make it comprehensible, we've created a scale so we can forget its unfathomable scale."

"Time is the only true unit of measure, it gives proof to the existence of matter, without time, we don’t exist."