11. As the movie progresses, we will regularly be kept abreast of Lucy’s increasing cerebral capacity (30 percent! 60 percent!). It’s a useful tool, enabling viewers to judge just how much more of the movie they will have to endure before she hits 100 and it’s over.

12. A non-comprehensive list of the powers Lucy acquires over the course of the film: perfect marksmanship, extreme agility, and instantaneous reflexes; the ability to control TVs and cell phones from thousands of miles away; immunity to pain and fear; telepathy, telekinesis, and clairvoyance; expertise in driving a car really fast into oncoming traffic; teleportation across time and space; and the capacity to alter her existing body parts or grow new ones. The one power she doesn’t seem to have—oddly, given the initial levitation—is flight. This is presumably because if she did, Besson would have no excuse to have her exercise her aforementioned car-driving skills to create rampant vehicular mayhem in Paris. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

13. So, to recap: A small amount of CPH4 makes you giggle. Somewhat more begins giving you all the powers noted above. Does this not make Mr. Jang the most inept criminal mastermind of all time? Why sell the stuff to junkies, when you could use it to create an army of super-soldiers, or to grant yourself god-like powers? And how can it be that no one else in the film, witnessing Lucy’s remarkable paranormal abilities, thinks, “Hey, maybe I should try a little of that CPH4 myself!” Half the film is spent chasing down the packets stashed in the other mules, yet despite rampant opportunities no one other than Lucy ever actually takes any of this all-powerful super-drug.

14. A couple more choice bits from Professor Norman’s speech, which is still being interspersed with the main plot: He notes with self-satisfaction that the human race needs to advance from “evolution to revolution,” which his upscale audience applauds enthusiastically, suggesting that they can’t tell the difference between a genuine insight and a sneaker ad. He also laments that “We don’t know anything more than a dog that watches the moon.” I fear that on the basis of this film it might be plausibly presumed that we actually know less.

15. But back, again, to Lucy and the central plot. She learns Chinese in a few minutes and busts out of her cell and into a hospital. There, she shoots a patient on the operating table and dumps the body onto the floor to make room for the surgeons to instead operate on her to remove the CPH4 from her abdomen. (This is an okay thing for her to do, because she’s also taught herself enough radiology and oncology to be confident that the other patient was going to die anyway.) The very concerned doctors explain to Lucy that CPH4 is a substance that occurs naturally in women during their sixth week of pregnancy (note: it’s not) that gives fetuses the “energy” to build their skeletal structure. How this fits in with everything else we’ve been told about “cerebral capacity” is left to viewers to puzzle out. Moreover, again, how is it that a bunch of random Chinese ER doctors seem to know more about the power and perils of CPH4 than, say, the pharmaceutical industry, the military-industrial complex, and the actual global crime syndicate that is smuggling the drug around the world?