Project Power: Film Review
With high-profile names like Jamie Foxx and Joseph Gordon-Levitt attached, I had extremely high hopes for Project Power and while it didn’t entirely deliver, it was still an entertaining ride.
The movie is set in New Orleans, where a new drug, Power, has come onto the market. It gives users superpowers for five minutes – but the catch is that they don’t know what their power will be before they take it and it can be lethal. Local cop Frank (Gordon-Levitt), suspicious that his superiors on the force are working with the makers of Power, does his own side mission to try and shut it down. Elsewhere, Art (Foxx), a former soldier with a secret vendetta, is trying to track the source of Power and kidnaps drug dealer Robin (Dominique Fishback) to make her help him.
The concept of Project Power is very cool and I was excited to see how it would play out. The premise lends itself to a bunch of fun action setpieces with Frank or Art coming into contact with a Power user and it was thrilling to see what superpower they would have. Some of these encounters were more bloody and gruesome than I expected them to be, so be warned. Also: you often have to suspend your belief and just accept that their five minutes haven’t run out yet, despite the setpieces lasting a while. It’s much more enjoyable that way.
Although Gordon-Levitt and Foxx are the big names in this movie, the star of the show for me was Fishback. She was the emotional heart of the piece, the person with the common ground between Frank and Art, and you understand why she is a drug dealer and don’t really think badly of her for it. She captivated me more than the others and she probably (don’t quote me on this) has more screen time than them, and rightly so. I also loved her raps. They were totally unnecessary but who cares, they were awesome.
Foxx was super badass in this and was part of some great action sequences. The motive for his character is slowly revealed throughout the movie and although I didn’t love how these flashes of backstory were presented, I liked his strong agenda. I love JGL, always have, but he is the weakest of the bunch. This isn’t necessarily his fault – his character is the least fleshed out and you didn’t really know much about him besides him being a cop. I liked the film most when the trio worked together so I would have liked that to have happened sooner.
I also want to give a shout-out to Rodrigo Santoro and Amy Landecker for being suitably menacing as the brains behind Power, Machine Gun Kelly for having a small yet pivotal role in the first Power-taking scene of the movie, and Courtney B. Vance, who pops up now and then as Frank’s boss.
Project Power is a pretty mindless action movie that doesn’t demand much from its audience. It’s a pretty flawed film but I found it thrilling, exciting, and entertaining.
Streaming on Netflix from Friday 14th August