'Lucy' super smart - and a little silly

IN "CADDYSHACK," Carl Spackler famously reports that the Dalai Lama has promised him "total consciousness."

In Luc Besson's "Lucy," we finally get a look at it, and it comes, agreeably, in the form of Scarlett Johansson.

She plays a random bystander who gets Shanghai'd (or in this case, Tapei'd) by Asian mobsters into being a mule for a new mind-expanding party drug.

The drug leaks into her bloodstream, she gets a hyperdose, and soon her mind is expanding its capacity exponentially, leading her to consult a theorist (Morgan Freeman) about what her fully utilized brain might enable her to do.

None of this makes much sense, since she's the smartest person in the world within a few hours, and doesn't need anybody's advice about anything.

Lucy ends up battling her mobster tormentors in Paris, where her super brainpower enables her to suspend criminals in mid-air and dodge bullets.

I didn't really absorb all of the movie's mythology and internal logic, because I only use the average 10 percent of my brain, and that's on a good day. Perhaps if I were at 12 percent, I'd understand why Lucy bothers steering her car during a chase when she has the power to control inanimate objects.

Besson, for his part, is certainly using his movie brain, and therefore links mind expansion with telekinesis and Jedi mind tricks and other things that play great on film. Other ideas about evolution seem less . . . evolved.

Still, the movie is mostly kinky fun, and has Besson ("La Femme Nikita," "The Messenger," "Transporter," "Taken," as producer) playing to his strengths - appealingly capable women, stories of revenge that are irresistible, and irresistibly short.