Lucy and the Myth That Keeps Giving

You only use ten percent of your brain—everyone knows it, nobody believes it anymore, and Luc Besson built a summer blockbuster on it anyway. In Lucy, Scarlett Johansson plays a woman who gets a synthetic drug sewn into her abdomen by some very stupid criminals, the bag ruptures, and suddenly she has access to the full hundred percent. What follows is that she becomes a superhuman genius capable of controlling matter, time, and anyone dumb enough to get in her way.

None of the neuroscience holds up for a second, and none of that matters. What matters is Johansson delivering the specific kind of cold, devastating focus she’s been quietly perfecting—the same register she used in Under the Skin, but pointed outward this time, with considerably more gunfire. She’s the kind of screen presence that makes pseudoscience feel like a reasonable price of admission. I’ve paid for worse.