I have long been an admirer of Scarlett Johansen’s figure, and now I find out she can act, and feel like I have a legitimate excuse to watch her movies. At first glance I dreaded viewing Lucy. It looked like a convergence of the two chief tropes in postmodern film: the killer babe and the sainted wise black man played—almost always it seems—by Morgan Freeman. For a while it even looked like that was what it was turning into. The film surprised in a refreshing way a half hour in.

This is big concept science-fiction, and seems to be most similar to Greg Bear’s Blood Music. The story is set in Taiwan and France. Lucy is a shallow cynical American party girl who has spent a week with some phony ass of an emasculated American man who gets her involved in what appears to either be a high stakes drug deal or terrorist plot involving some really scary Chinese bad guys.

Seemingly unrelated, Morgan Freeman’s character lectures on the potential of the human mind at a Paris symposium. The filmmaker almost lost us here during this speech, with junior high school level supporting nature film clips. This part was so bad that we might have pulled the DVD if not for the fact that I had yet to see Scarlett in tight-fitting attire—which brought a disdainful eye-rolling snort from my lady friend. Then the movie kicked off and got better by the scene.

This is good big picture sci-fi without all of the soap opera trash that normally finds its way into these films.

The Europeans still seem to be good for something.