This R-rated action/thriller reminded me once again that writer/director Luc Besson ("The Family") is the French Martin Scorsese, with characters "popped" (shot) without compunction, people stabbed unexpectedly and beaten mercilessly, but his complex plot is laid out with crystal clarity.

The film switches back and forth between college student Lucy, as she is thrust into a terrifyingly lethal situation, and an anthropology lecture which provides us with the background that enables us to follow the story. We soon find ourselves questioning the nature of knowledge.

We watch:

• * Scarlett Johansson ("The Avengers") is our eponymous heroine, tricked into a shady deal, brutalized, and inadvertently turned into a lab experiment.
• * Morgan Freeman ("Last Vegas") plays a professor of anthropology who speculates about the mind-boggling potential of a human able to use 100% of its brain.
• * Amr Waked ("Salmon Fishing in the Yemen") is the gendarme Lucy keeps around as "a reminder."
• * Min-sik Choi ("Oldboy" 2003) is a gangster who has seen the prodigious profits that might be possible from a synthetic compound that could change human nature.
• * Julian Rhind-Tutt ("Notting Hill") is the obsequious facilitator who instructs the drug "mules" as they are forced to smuggle the compound to three major cities.

In my opinion, the eye-popping special effects were a bit overdone (but I always say that, don't I?), and I would have been happy if we had stopped when she had achieved only 80% of her potential, but based on the size of the screening crowd which had to be shoe-horned into the theater, this exciting, involving film should do very, very well.