In the hurtful, slapdash fantasy action thriller “Project Power”, people get high by swallowing a tablet that looks like a cross between an old Contact-cold relief capsule and a small light bulb. The lower half of the pill is dark and ridged, the upper half is a bright orange Tesla energy field. The drug affects different takers in different ways – or maybe it just depends on what piece of visual effects the filmmakers feel when released at any given moment.
Somewhere catches a drug lord fire, like Johnny Storm of the Fantastic Four, only in this case he is real on fire, his body turned into a running char, as if he were one of the X-Men who remembered himself. (At its peak, he decays like John Cassavetes at the end of “The Fury.”) Another guy’s body changes color and turns transparent as he runs really, really fast (45 miles per hour according to a breathless headline – which by my estimated kind makes him the $ 2 million Man). A woman’s limbs turn to ice, like something out of ‘Frozen’ (a joke the film makes), and a man bulges out like the Hulk; characters also get the ability to get rid of bullets. But the effects of the drug last only five minutes, and although it is said to exert extraordinary “power” (a word that the film uses about 10,000 times, just as it made it stronger), it is not seen highly in this way all so much fun.
“Project Power” feels like part of a new trend in Netflix movies, or perhaps a new genre: a movie that is not a traditional superhero movie – it’s more of a jacked-up street thriller – but is full of touches that remember you of superhero movies, so at certain points it counts kind of. (Since sitting at home and scarfing entertainment on the small screen, there’s an impulse to say, “Check this out! It’s good enough!”) The Netflix smash “The Old Guard” was actually a superhero movie. In “Project Power”, however, we are not asked to have roots for these hungry-for-almighty souls who jump capsules; they are random human guinea pigs. We have roots for Art, alias the Major (Jamie Foxx), a former military officer who is on a collision course under the world to learn who distributes the drugs so he can drill it to his source. He works alongside Robin (Dominique Fishback), a high school helion who has been selling the drugs on the side, and they become unusual allies in a race to see what “power” really means.
“Project Power” has drive, small detonations of visual magic, the resonant setting of an even more desperate New Orleans, and a better cast than a movie like this tends to have. Yet seeing it, you may even be aware of how patched the whole thing is. The film’s directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman (who made the 2011 documentary “Catfish” and then directed two direct stories “Paranormal Activity”) want to give you a buzz. Every time the drug is popped up, there are montages of extensive eyebrows and synapses that trigger, cruelly mimicking those in “Requiem for a Dream,” and the whole thing. this drug will make you great! concept feels like an elevator from “Limitless”, the great dramatic thriller of 2011 that set Bradley Cooper as an actor who could do more than a “Hangover” movie. “Limitless” was about a drug that was pure brain sugar – one that allows you to tap the function other 80 percent of your brains, and Cooper turned his character into a glittery-eyed schmoozer genius – and the ancient delight of it was that the audience shared in the heights.
In “Project Power” we are outside the drug experience, but the real clue to the rather sly soul of this flashy adventure is that it turns into a thriller about a conspiracy that is grandiose, but even more abstract. The drug is part of a master plan to control people: to take away their power by giving them a false sense of power. That sounds like a nice theme, but the script, by Mattson Tomlin, is a scrupulous piece of work that makes you long for the sinister specificity and the rooted danger of a good drug drama. “Project Power” is basically too much of a sketchbook of a movie with showcase effects.
And yet … everyone to watch, but ultimately just okay, Netflix potboiler should have an actor as inspired as Jamie Foxx in the center. Here’s a serious question: Does Foxx ea call it in? (I would say no.) In “Project Power,” he plays a lost soldier who has personal reasons for his crusade, and Foxx dramatizes that engagement with a cool, wounded, reflective, moment-to-moment intensity that never flutters. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, as a cop who feels it’s his mandate to take the drug, because all the enemies he fights on it, start doing a bizarre exaggerated robot macho-man thing, like was this his personification of a poor Keanu Reeves performance. But he puts himself in a groove and becomes a stalwart presence. And Dominique Fishback, so superb in “The Hate You Give,” proves once again that she has the right game. Her Robin presents an authentic fabric of trauma and attitude, and she’s a freelance rapper – nailing Fishback, delivering her rhymes (written by Chika) with a do-or-die smolder.
The variety of casting, which has become a Netflix feature, lends the film’s coherence – at least, in theory – a fresh dimension of social vibe, evoking tones of the 1932 Tuskegee experiment, and the widespread perception that the drugs who roamed downtown in the late ’60s,’ 70s, and ’80s did so with a silent degree of government approval. However, that does not relieve the film of the need to fill in the logistics of the conspiracy in a compelling way. Like other recent Netflix action movies (“Extraction” and, yes, “The Old Guard”), “Project Power” gives you the sensation that it makes so many decades worth of pulp clichés that the movie can hardly be bothered if it’s all but in remix.
