Project Power Is A Good Superhero Movie Missing A Good Villain
The new Netflix movie Project Power checks off all the right boxes for a modern superhero movie. It’s gritty, has a realistic take on what having actual powers might do to individuals and what the desire for that power might do to people and society. The story is tightly written, the directing leaves time for atmospheric moments to develop the tone, and the leads are all excellent. The only big problem with Project Power is the lack of any clear or singular villain to be the antagonist. And that keeps the movie from jumping out of the good pile and into the great pile.
Below is my spoiler-free review, revealing no more than can be seen in the trailers, or basic elements such as character names and the like.
Stylishly directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman from a script by Mattson Towlson, who also wrote the upcoming Robert Pattinson movie The Batman, Project Power tells the story of three people caught up in the illegal trade of a drug called Power which gives anyone who takes it a super power for exactly five minutes. And before I get into the characters and actors, allow me a brief aside. The marketing makes a big mistake in the way it implies how the Power pills work. The trailer leads us to believe that the powers given by the pill are random every time. And very quickly in the movie you see that isn’t the case — they are random the first time, but every time you take the pill after that you get that same power. I’ve even read or seen other reviewers continue to make this mistake after they have watched the movie.
About that cast though
Jamie Foxx is excellent as the haunted, driven badass Art, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is solid as New Orleans cop Frank and Dominique Fishback nails it in the most important role of the movie as Robin. She is the emotional and thematic core of the movie — a teenage Black girl who deals the drug Power to overcome a system that treats Black people and women very poorly. Fishback does such a convincing job as the tough yet vulnerable, sassy yet adorable teenager Robin that I never made the connection that she played the very complex street prostitute Darlene in the amazing HBO series The Deuce. That, folks, is what the movie people call “range.”
I’m not sure who should get credit for the biggest win in the movie, the nearly complete lack of plot logic problems. Maybe it is the directors, maybe the production designer Naomi Shohan whose credits include American Beauty and Constantine among many more, and maybe the writer Towlson. But the principle of Chekov’s Gun is applied consistently in Project Power — every reveal of a power (or anything, really) that plays a role in a later scene in the movie is hinted at or revealed earlier in the film. There is no out-of-left-field deus ex machina here. Even beyond that, it seems like someone was paying attention to that gritty realism I mentioned above. Simple things like hand prints on glass doors when someone who would leave a hand print passed through it before the point-of-view character chasing them, to give just one example.
So when we get the big encounter between our trio of heroes and the villains, it is extra disappointing that those villains are simply characterless placeholders. Worse, one villain hinted at as very important to the bad guys’ side turns out to be nothing of the sort. And not in a “subvert those expectations” way, more of a “oh, that’s all it is?” way. Thematically I guess it makes sense — one of the themes of the movie is that the faceless military-industrial complex will do anything it wants to people it sees as having little value, particularly poor people and people of color. So in that sense having an almost characterless set of villains fits. But even the James Bond movies knew that you need a compelling villain as the face of the nebulous big bads the hero is going up against. Project Power has no such villain, and is slightly worse for it.
To be clear, there is so much more that is right with Project Power that I still recommend it strongly. The special effects are amazing, and full credit to special effects supervisor Ilya Churinov for bringing that Russian SFX experience to this movie. The soundtrack is excellent, and the up-and-coming rapper Chika wrote the amazing free-style raps for Robin (OK, minor spoiler but not relevant to the plot). She also wrote and performs the end credit track My Power, which might become the anthem for any budding rapper, writer, teacher, etc. (video embedded below).
I give Project Power (Netflix, Screen Arcade, Supermarché; R; 1hr, 53mins) a 4 out 5.
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