Project Power
Directed by: Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman
Produced by: Eric Newman & Bryan Unkeless
Written by: Mattson Tomlin
Starring: Jamie Foxx; Joseph Gordon-Levitt; Dominique Fishback; Rodrigo Santoro; Colson Baker; Allen Maldonado; Amy Landecker; Courtney B. Vance
Music by: Joseph Trapanese
Cinematography: Michael Simmonds
Edited by: Jeff McEvoy
Production companies: Screen Arcade, Supermarche
Distributed by Netflix
It would be easy to dismiss Project Power as just another exploitation film aimed at an African-American audience. The characters are formulaic to the point of being trite: the troubled black teen highschooler who becomes a drug dealer (played with startling verisimilitude by the 29 year old Dominique Fishback) but has a secret musical talent; the bent cop with the heart of gold; the soldier whose daughter has been kidnapped by the baddies for nefarious purposes, and of course the baddies, who are heavily bearded and speak with Slavic accents, and that’s just the women. The plot device—a pill that gives the user superpowers for a brief time—is also very shopworn. And just so the viewer is made aware that this isn’t just an ordinary capsule, these come with a little lit LED inside. Silly, I know, but used to good dramatic effect in one of the climatic scenes.
Like the original Major League or Princess Bride, it’s a genre movie that’s better than it ought to have been. The dialogue is sharp, and the characters, if a bit trite, are engaging and focus into real people in fairly short order. The plotline isn’t particularly original, but the presence of the Power drug allows for some interesting and sometimes arresting complications, not to mention some snazzy special effects.
Everyone who takes the drug gets their own unique superpower for five minutes. Five minutes exactly, so you see people pressing the stopwatch function on their wristwatches and phones, which gets a bit annoying. But the powers available range from super strength or invulnerability to invisibility (actually a very well done chameleon effect) to one chap who gets to be a power shrimp. If you haven’t read about these amazing and very dangerous little crustaceans, look them up. They have one of the most amazing predatory mechanisms found in nature.
The end of the movie leaves it ambiguous as to whether they destroy the drug and its would-be cartel, but I hope they didn’t, because you could have bunches of movies and TV series exploring the social ramifications of such a drug loose in society. Alan Moore introduced the world to the dark side of superpowered humans, and The Boys does a good job of exploring that with “V.” But for people who don’t want that story line to be as dark and violent, Project Power seems like a promising start.
Now on Netflix.