Project Power

Project Power is the latest in a seemingly never ending series of movies about people with superhuman abilities. Most of the time these films end with a city levelling climactic battle with feels so generic your eyes will roll out of your head. Project Power goes the other way. With a small scale face off on a boat at night that you've seen in a 1000 other films. Yup, it may be different but it's just as dull. Like so many other times in Project Power it's yet another wasted opportunity.

New Orleans has always had it's issues with crime but when a drug called Power hits the city the cops find themselves fighting a losing battle. Power is a bit different to the usual class A's. Here you derive your high from gaining a superpower for 5 minutes at a time. The power is different for everyone. Some can regulate their temperatures to extremes, others can regenerate life, some can run ultra fast and others can deflect bullets with their skin. It's, of course, the talk of the town, everyone wants it. Robin (Dominique Fishback) is a young dealer who works out a deal with a cop called Frank (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), supplying him with the drug so he can secretly take it to help him fight the criminals using it themselves. Then there's Art (Jamie Foxxzzzzzzz....). Art's in town for his own reasons, reasons involving his family and the genesis of power and eventually his path will cross with that of the others.

There's a sequence about halfway through this that will knock your socks off. A one take 360 degree pan of a bloody nightclub battle shot from inside a glass cage where a woman is tripping her ass off on Power, while bodies burst and shatter all around her. It's inventive, exciting and visually amazing. It will have you thinking that the dull hour or so you had to put up with to get here was worth your while. You'll assume the film is about to move to a higher plain, that shit is about to get real (I realise this line is as cliched as the end of this film, no need to point it out) and then........it flops back on its arse again. It has a pretty cool premise (powers derived from animals) and just wastes it in the dullest possible ways. We get to hear about cool abilities but never get to see them with the film choosing again and again to concentrate on done to death gunplay and wisecrackery. The wisecracks....oh god, they feel so wedged in, added in post to give character's depth and the film humour and all failing miserably. Levitt's Eastwood impression will have you edging your hand ever closer to the off switch when eventually a bullet stops it. Not a spoiler btw.

Levitt's usually a charming face to have pop up in a film but he doesn't add much here, failing to create any real bit of chemistry with either Foxx or Fishback, but at least he tries and does look quite convincing in the full flow of action. He's come a long way from little Tommy on Third Rock From The Sun. Foxx though, Foxx is in full on sleepwalk mode, he's not quite hit the Bruce Willis stage of things yet but it's getting close. His heart just isn't in this at all leaving Fishback to carry the load which she does admirably. So good in TV's The Deuce, she gets a couple nice moments here (an imagined face off with a teacher which shows off her linguistic skills and some quieter moments with her mother) and honestly, it if wasn't for her and that one take battle mentioned earlier there wouldn't be anything to recommend here at all.

It's admirable to see a film about superhuman abilities come at things from a different angle but jesus, when you have an interesting premise at least do something interesting with it. Oh and two other things. One. Don't set a film in a wonderful place like New Orleans and not use the city to it's fullest. Seriously, it could be anywhere USA. Two. Never waste a brilliant actor like Courtney B. Vance. Never. That's just flat out unforgivable.

Project Power is streaming on Netflix now. Put it on in the background or something.