(This review contains spoilers. I think you should read it anyway)

One of the few complaints I remember seeing about Breaking Bad, while it was still on the air, was that it was too flashy for its own good, resorting to fancy novelty shots from time to time. Personally, this never bothered me about the series, and was something I quite enjoyed about it. Nobody was arguing that Breaking Bad didn’t have the depth of character, story, and theme to back it up, so why not throw some style into the mix? Stylistic flourishes should be used like a spice, adding a tiny bit more flavor to an already-satisfying dish.

Where it does become a problem is with a film like Lucy, in which there is nothing compelling for the visual flourishes to spice up. Every chance he gets, filmmaker Luc Besson tosses in cutaways to further emphasize already obvious points. While Morgan Freeman is explaining the drive for organisms to reproduce, he cuts away to multiple shots of animals having sex, just in case we had a momentary lapse in knowledge and needed to have the method of reproduction re-established for us. Earlier, when Lucy (played by a very game Scarlett Johansson) is being tricked by her boyfriend so that she’ll do a dangerous job for him, we’re shown an image of a mouse almost taking cheese from a mousetrap. Then, when she is captured by the bad guys for attempting to deliver her boyfriend’s package, we see a cheetah killing its prey. But wait, isn’t Lucy wearing a cheetah-fur jacket? Oh ho ho, dear viewer, a reversal of fortune is afoot!

Again, these silly flourishes would be fine, if they weren’t the only things Lucy had going for it. Let me make this perfectly clear: Lucy is one of the stupidest movies I have ever watched. Its central premise is a towering mountain of bullshit, built higher and higher as the characters shovel heap after heap of complete nonsense onto its mass. For a start, the science from which it draws its central premise, that we only use 10% of our brain potential, is a myth. It’s completely false, and possibly stems from the idea that we only use about 10% of our brain on any given task. To say that our brains are not living up to their capabilities is akin to saying our computers are only reaching their potential if they are accessing every single file on their hard drives at once. It’s ridiculous.

That alone isn’t a problem. There are movies built on flimsier ideas and urban legends. But then Besson starts building off of that by completely pulling facts out of his ass, hoping that Morgan Freeman’s soothing voice will make them seem plausible. The claim that dolphins are capable of echolocation because they use 20% of their brains, and that we would be too if we used that much of our brain, is completely laughable. So is the idea that, with more of our brain’s power, we could control our environments with our minds, leave our physical bodies, and mentally travel through time. That is the basis of Morgan Freeman’s theory, because science. It is also the basis of Scientology, and Scientology is bullshit.

But fine. So the movie’s stupid. It’s not like I’ve never enjoyed a stupid movie. I will always go to bat for, say, Crank, another movie about a central character being injected with a made-up drug who only has one day to kill a drug lord. That movie’s premise is idiotic, and its sequel, in which the hero survives a fall out of a helicopter because he has a super-heart, is even more absurd. But both of those films use their insane premises as devices, really meant to set a wild tone and allow for balls-to-the-wall action sequences and a lightning-fast pace.

In Lucy, the idiocy is the ACTUAL POINT of the movie. Lucy is surgically implanted with a fancy drug that apparently helps unlock brain potential, its container breaks open inside of her, and the drugs go into effect (a situation visualized by Lucy convulsing around while literally rolling up a wall and across the ceiling, like she’s possessed by the devil or something). Unlike what you might think from the trailer, this isn’t really an action movie. Sure, she beats up the sexual predator guy who kicked her drug-bag open, and she shoots a couple people in the head (they needed SOMETHING for the trailers), but less than halfway through the movie she unlocks the ability to control other people with her mind. The movie sticks with this established fact, so there isn’t a lot of action once Lucy can wave her arms and make everybody pass out. It’s sort of like if Neo gained complete control in The Matrix after his training scenes. The rest of the movie would be pointless. Almost all of Lucy is pointless.

Luc Besson seems to believe that he is actually sharing something smart, original, and profound with this movie. By the time Lucy can control time, she has made her way to Morgan Freeman’s character Samuel Norman, who is working on backing up her near-infinite data before it is lost forever, or at least until somebody else tries this synthetic drug that can still be manufactured (the movie ignores that last fact). Here, while she is backing up data and physically turning into a black-goo supercomputer (because again, this is what happens when you use all of your brain), she travels back in time to see dinosaurs, and then to visit the first human ancestor (the same one that became our Lucy fossil, because of course it is). She then touches ape-Lucy’s finger with her own finger, becoming the origin and inspiration for the famous Creation of Adam painting, and presumably becoming the source of human intelligence.

Roughly five minutes later, she hits 100% brain usage, vanishes into the cosmos, uses her limitless omnipresent existence to text message a character “I am everywhere,” and leaves behind a cosmic USB dongle. It is a USB drive that looks like a hole cut in reality to show the stars, sort of like Stan’s shirt in the Monkey Island games, but with stars instead of a checkered pattern. This USB stick contains all knowledge in the universe. I have nothing else to say about that.

So that’s Lucy. Easily one of the stupidest movies I’ve ever watched, and one with no real function other than to share that stupidity. The nicest thing I can say about it is that it looked pretty, and I had a blast writing about it.