Project Power Goes From Hero to Zero

A drug is taking hold of the citizens of New Orleans. It’s called Power and this little yellow pill gives you quite the trip. For five minutes, you get a superpower. You don’t know what it is, it could be super-strength, it could shoot fire out of your hands, you could even just explode. Everybody wants this drug, including the three lead characters of Project Power. There’s Robin (Dominique Fishback), a High School dealer of Power who just wants enough money to take care of her Mom. Then there’s New Orleans Police Department officer Frank Shaver (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), whose been given a top-secret mission to find the suppliers of Power. Finally, we have The Major (Jamie Foxx), a mysterious individual whose tracking down whoever’s in charge of the Power drug supply for his own personal reasons.

Project Power may star characters who can become invincible but its script is riddled with flaws. For starters, it’s weird how little of the actual premise takes advantage of its most unique concept, the idea of people being able to garner superpowers. The one interesting set-piece in Project Power, which concerns Shaver chasing down a bank robber with the ability to camouflage, suggests a way more imaginative production. The rest of Project Power concerns itself with shoot-outs and dock chases that could happen in any movie.

It doesn’t help that most of the superpowers, including the super-tough skin of Shaver or a bad guy who can protrude his bones, are rendered in a cheap fashion that reminded me of something you might see on a CW superhero show rather than a feature film. Then again, a villainous character who turns into a big CGI Hulk-like creation suggests that maybe it was a good idea to realize these superpowers in a grounded fashion. This character is rendered in truly garish CGI while his design kept making me think that Mr. Hyde from The League of Extraordinary Gentleman was making a guest appearance.

Whether the action in Project Power concerns superpowers or not, directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman struggle in filming action scenes. This is epitomized by a bizarre decision to frame an extended one-take action sequence through a blurry glass surface that renders the whole scene impossible to look at. What we do get to see isn’t much better. Most of the fights in Project Power are what you’d expect from the worst episode of one of those Marvel/Netflix shows. People engaging in clumsy choreography in dimly-lit hallways that somebody tossed a yellow or orange tint over in post-production.

Beyond the action and use of superpowers, Project Power also has some truly baffling story decisions, including its inability to maintain a single villain for the audience to root against. Baddies just come and go without leaving much of an impact throughout Project Power, with the only one that comes close to leaving an impression is an abruptly-introduced adversary played by Amy Landecker. That one proved memorable only because I was shocked to see Amy Landecker just show up randomly in the third act of this clunky movie. Meanwhile, the choice to keep The Major’s motivations a secret for so long really puts up a barrier between him and the audience despite Jamie Foxx continuing to have charisma for days.

Foxx and the rest of the cast do what they can with the script, but there’s only so much water you can wring out of a towel that’s bone-dry. What Project Power lacks in interesting characters, though, it makes up for in ham-fisted social commentary. In case you missed that the Power pill is supposed to be a metaphor for any number of addictive pharmaceuticals, the camera lingers on pills by the bedside of Robin’s mom, Robin has a high school teacher who gives lectures on fetal alcohol syndrome and Frank Shaver says that he has to take matters into his own hands because “remember what happened the last time New Orleans waited for a bunch of guys in suits to do something?”

Project Power makes awkward gestures at real-world issues in its first act, never actually comments on them and then proceeds to abandon them entirely for the rest of the movie so it can do equally awkward action movie hijinks. It’s just one of the many reasons Project Power becomes super forgettable rather than super heroic.