Project Powers Review: Power comes with responsibility…

Project Power is set in the largely Black communities of New Orleans where the scars of Katrina are still visible and social inequality is a fact of life. It stars two charismatic Black performers, Academy Award winner Jamie Foxx and Dominique Fishback (The Deuce) playing a high schooler despite being close to 30 in real life. The pair team up to investigate (with urgency) the origins of a mysterious pill which gives the taker a personalized superpower for precisely five minutes.

For the past six weeks, there have been a series of strange occurrences around the city. Citizens claiming they have been hit or robbed by a ghost, people climbing walls and seeing others aflame.

Police believe these are all are linked to rise of a new drug nicknamed “Power” for the superhuman properties it bestows on the user – if only for five minutes. They are pills that could change the world and topple governments, but they are also highly dangerous. “You get, what you get,” as young dealer Robin (Dominique Fishback) puts it – a pill might make you bulletproof, give you super speed, or you might simply explode. That’s the risk you take.

The pill is spreading like wildfire within the New Orleans criminal community and Fishback’s Robin is a dealer trying to raise money for her mother’s health costs and Foxx (as The Major) is looking for his missing daughter, an early casualty of the new drug’s development.

Like most action pictures these days, ‘action’ is a synonym for violence and there’s plenty of crunchy hand-to-hand business even if the choreography renders a lot of it as just a dark, noisy mess.

Foxx’s natural charisma remains present as his personal vendetta to find the source of the pill becomes the central through-line of the plot, though the character himself remains largely unmemorable.

On the other hand, Gordon-Levitt is most underserved as by-any-means-necessary hero cop Frank, a thin role that already feels like a waste for the talented actor who never seems to age. But Gordon shines throughout the film, lifting the high-octane feature to another level when he is needed too.

FINAL THOUGHTS: To be fair, writer Mattson Tomlin (who is penning the screenplay for the upcoming The Batman) does a good job of world-building. But despite Foxx’s major claiming “that this ain’t no Batman and Robin, that’s just a movie, this is real life”, Project Power pretty much sticks to the comic-book cinematic formula.

It never really makes us truly care for the characters and perhaps, most importantly, fails to deliver us a proper villain, but the fight scenes are graphic enough, and the ending serves as a potential sequel?

4/5 STARS