"Project Power" Is An Action Flick Almost Worth Powering Through
6/12 ForReel Score | 2.5/5 Stars
It’s 2:30 in the morning, I'm oddly awake, and Netflix has just debuted Project Power. I could go back to sleep, but I decide to throw the movie on instead. What I find in the 2 hour runtime is a film I can only partially care about. There are plenty of action film pitfalls that Project Power happily stumbles into, but also some redeeming qualities that attempt to counteract the cinema sins. It just took a lot of my own power to enjoy the good while tolerating the bad.
Project Power revolves around three characters, Art (Jamie Foxx), Frank (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), and Robin (Dominique Fishback), who have varying relationships with a pill that offers superhuman abilities and has flooded the streets of New Orleans. In pursuit of their own objectives - Frank protecting his city, Robin dealing the drug to make ends meet, and Art trying to rescue his daughter - the three have to work together to find the source of these unstable drugs before they destroy their community.
I honestly found Project Power’s plot to be unnecessarily mundane. It’s an action movie that by and large sticks to a paint-by-numbers formula, teeming with excessively violent and CGI drenched action sequences. Perhaps that's what Netflix users without access to movie theaters might want, but for me it’s less eye candy than it is eye rolling content.
And that's the unfortunate thing about Project Power: extravagant action sequences and a plot with too many objectives overshadows the more meaningful interpretation of “power” that it passively alludes to. Robin is given a couple moments to demonstrate her talents in rapping; what Art eventually declares as her power. But she’s never given anything substantial to do with it, rendering a couple impressive freestyle scenes inconsequential.
There is, however, an admirably keen awareness of real-world conflicts infused in the midst of the sci-fi. The script makes a valiant effort to address struggles of underprivileged populations and minorities, with the negative effects of poverty fueling Robin’s part of the story.
Ultimately in a film with weak (sometimes even goofy) antagonists, it’s the headlining cast - Foxx, Gordon-Levitt, and Fishback - who offer sustenance to the experience. The chemistry between these three keeps each of their storylines interesting, with Fishback being the standout thanks to the aforementioned freestyle sequences.
It seems as though there was much more power in this project than the this filmmaking team could actualize, which is a shame. As the film came to a close, the empowering tracks from rap artist Chika laid over the final shots and credits remind me that Project Power probably would’ve been more powerful had it focused more on the social struggles than the overabundance of sci-fi.
But the fact remains that at 2:30am, I managed to stay awake and watch the whole movie. So I guess that’s saying something.
Acting and Casting - 1 | Visual Effects and Editing - 2 | Story and Message - 0 | Entertainment Value - 1 | Music Score and Soundtrack - 2 | Reviewer's Preference - 0 | What does this mean?
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