The summer movie Lucy, starring Scarlett Johansson, took the top spot at the weekend box office making just over $44 million during its debut. Not bad for a mid-summer action movie. It's easily one of the top 10 best reviewed movies of the summer so far, scoring better than average with several top movie critics.

The film, directed by French action director Luc Besson, was made on a budget of $40 million and played on 3,173 screens in the United State. It easily beat its rival Hercules, which made $29 million this weekend, and played on 3,595 screens, according to Box Office Mojo.

While Johansson was applauded for her role, the movie wasn't seen as a hit all around.

"Johansson is excellent as the title character, and the opening scenes in which she's dragged into Mr. Jang's world are suspenseful and suggest that Besson would have fared better just making another straightforward action flick, as that's usually his forte," wrote clclt.com, which called the movie a "dud".

In summing up most of the film, which also stars Morgan Freeman, the dissolve.com wrote about the movie's screenplay. "This is the danger inherent in movies about extremely smart characters: They can only be as smart as the people who create them, and 'Lucy' plays like '2001: A Space Odyssey' as reimagined by a pothead college dropout who watched clips of Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece on his iPhone while taking a self-defense class. Equal parts high-minded (or maybe just high) science fiction about the origins and destiny of human consciousness, and low-brow Eurotrash action flick complete with sadistic violence, breakneck car chases, and, yes, a bazooka, Lucy earns points for its unpredictable treatment of its vaguely superhero-ish premise and an appealing silliness, but it struggles to match wits with the genius at its center."

Further knocking the hit film down a notch is this analysis from Indiewire.com, "LUCY, while it is an action science-fiction narrative that empowers a White female character it does so at the expense of reducing the credibility and the agency of the educated Black male character of Professor Norman (Morgan Freeman) who spends much of the second half of the film with his mouth half open in awe.  In fact after establishing Professor Norman as the leading researcher in Brain Neuro-science, Lucy first comes to him for assistance, but quickly surpasses him in thought, action and agency as the film progresses.  Moreover, it is Lucy who has the power to stop, speed up and reverse time back to the origins of the universe and provide information regarding the destiny of man.  Even though she hands this information to Professor Norman in the form of the ultimate universal USB device, the credit is still hers to claim.  The ubiquity of her power is expressed in a line that she sends as a text to a police detective after she has left her physical body: 'I am everywhere.' "

Still, the movie won its share of fans. The Austin Chronicle called it the best comic book movie not based on a comic book."The best comic-book movie in a long time, though based on no comic, Lucy is a film that mates classic Besson with Quentin Tarantino in a go at the mystical, world-solving vision found in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life. Rendered just as cosmically as those two but far more grounded in pulp, it is less spectacular, though oddly more definitive."