At some points watching Project Power, a new crime thriller streaming on Netflix with nods to the superhero genre, it gradually felt more to me like the service’s older, R-rated Marvel TV shows prior to Disney+. The cast of characters here almost seemed like they could hang out with the Defenders, as it has a similar tone to things like Luke Cage and Jessica Jones with its blend of noir-ish crime elements and over-the-top fantasy.
For better and for worse, this is a very aggressive movie- one that falls into the “superheroes without masks or capes” genre that The Old Guard also belongs to. And overall, I did enjoy Project Power– but if these two films were, say, Olympic sprinters- Old Guard gracefully leaps over the hurdles, whereas Power barrels through them and breaks them. Directed by Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost, it has a lot going on. Occasionally the story feels all over the map because it has so many different ideas, but it’s anchored by likable characters thankfully.
Screenwriter Mattson Tomlin has composed a much darker spin on Captain America’s “super-soldier” origins. Set in New Orleans, a strange drug called Power is being spread on the streets by the sinister organization Teleios. $500 pays for one capsule that grants the user one random ability for five minutes, providing one swallow the right capsule (basically, one that won’t blow you up). Soon criminals across the city are using them to commit high-powered crimes, prompting 911 calls reporting people with super-strength, speed, and other bizarre feats.
Robin, a local aspiring teenage rapper played by Dominique Fishback, has gotten herself mixed up in selling Power in order to pay for her mother’s prescriptions. She’s protected from powered-up enemies by Frank (Joseph Gordon- Levitt), a NOPD detective who’s secretly taking pills from Robin in order to get a competitive edge against the crime wave (one of my favorite sequences involves him getting bulletproof abilities and chasing down a chameleon bank-robber).
This all makes Robin a person of interest to Jamie Foxx’s Art (also known as “The Major), a former soldier who’s trying to rescue his daughter kidnapped by Teleios for a mysterious reason. The three initially have trouble trusting one another, as you might expect, but they do form a solid bond in order to stop the organization’s plot to create world-conquering super-soldiers.
What I enjoyed most were the performances of the three leads. Foxx as Art is bloody and brutal towards all of the baddies, but he does harbor a softer side and flashes of charm at points. JGL’s Frank and Fishback’s Robin have good, funny chemistry together, as Levitt adds decent comic relief without descending into total goofiness (you could almost see it as a variation of John “Robin” Blake from Dark Knight Rises, and the irony isn’t lost as Dominique does work a Batman and Robin quip in towards Art), while Fishback’s performance has a ton of emotion and gravity to it. She actually cuts some nice freestyles in a few scenes (though one was depicted as a fantasy sequence, and it was cool enough to where I think they should have just actually had her do it, may as well).
The film does have a fair amount of humor that helps to offset the violent, darker edges of the plot. At one point when Art meets Robin, I was thinking “okay, maybe you’re being a little harsh on this kid”, but their relationship eventually does evolve for the better as Major’s backstory is developed, giving needed context to some of his decisions.
There’s an inherent storyline convenience in how random the powers in each pill are distributed (“You get what you get”, Robin explains to a potential customer), allowing a pretty wide range of action scenes in the story featuring henchmen with unique powers. Some include a battle with Rodrigo Santoro’s Biggie (who’s clearly having fun in the role), a sleazy dealer who turns into giant troll-creature inside a nightclub. You can also find an assassin covered in deadly spikes, and a pusher named Newt (Machine Gun Kelly) who swallows a pill transforming into a darker, more frantic variation on the Human Torch.
Project Power tries to pack a lot inside a two-hour runtime, which makes its Netflix-Marvel aura even funnier because at points the plot does feel a little overstuffed. The government conspiracy has a ton of social subtexts behind it, with Art making references to how Power is systemically used for ill. That, alongside other plot threads like Art’s military background, and Robin and Frank’s relationship (I’d have like to have gotten some detail on what events first brought them together) it probably could have been better expanded on were this a ten-to-thirteen episode TV series.
Ultimately it’s not a slam-dunk classic, as it can be a bit tropey, and I think a different format would have allowed it to push its ideas into different places- sometimes the story features what comes off as a pointed critique of America’s drug war, and its futility. But it’s still an entertaining sci-fi action tale with a lot of strong local New Orleans atmosphere to it (note Frank’s Saints jersey, who honks his horn in frustration as football fans spill into the streets), and a trio of appealing lead heroes that could be expanded further in future installments.
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