It was announced in April that Scarlett Johansson would be teaming up with French writer/director Luc Besson for his latest project Lucy. Besson had a streak of films featuring strong female leads back in the 1990s including La Femme Nikita, Joan of Arc, and the sci-fi adventure The Fifth Element. More recently however, he worked on the mob comedy The Family starring Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Tommy Lee Jones, which is set to release on September 13th, 2013.  Now, it looks like he is gearing up to return to the female-driven action-thriller genre and  Morgan Freeman is in talks to take part. Freeman had previously worked on a Besson project with 2005’s Jet Li-starring Unleashed, which Besson produced. 

The script for Lucy was written by Besson himself, and the story centers on a woman who was forced to become a drug-mule. The drug she is made to carry ends up leaking into her system and causing her to develop powerful abilities including telekinesis, the ability to absorb knowledge instantaneously, the ability to see the future, and total control over her emotions and pain responses. Although the drug endows Lucy with these amazing powers, it also threatens to be the cause of her death.  Johansson, no stranger to ass-kicking (as seen through her role as Marvel operative Black Widow in The Avengers and Iron Man 2), will be playing the heroine while Freeman is attached to play a well-versed professor of evolution and the human brain who could possibly save Lucy’s life.

The film aims to be released in 2014.