Project Power: When Superpowers Become the New Street Drug
In the gritty streets of New Orleans, a new menace is spreading like wildfire: a mysterious drug that grants its users a random superpower – or, more often than not, a fatal end. A shadowy corporation is behind this dangerous substance, using the city as their testing ground to showcase the drug’s potential to prospective buyers, from ruthless mafia bosses to corrupt third-world governments.
At the heart of this conflict is Art (Jamie Foxx), a man driven by a desperate mission: to find his kidnapped daughter, who has been unwillingly turned into a source of raw material for the drug, having developed superpowers of her own. To get to the top of the corporation, he kidnaps Robin, a teenage drug dealer. But Frank (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the city’s almost-too-good-to-be-true cop, steps in to help her, even using the “power” himself to even the odds.
Netflix’s original action films have earned a reputation – often deservedly – for being generic B-movies, the kind of entertainment that’s good enough to watch on TV but not worth the big screen experience. Why Netflix keeps churning out films like “Bright” and “The Old Guard” is no mystery. The streaming service’s business model prioritizes watchable content over cinematic masterpieces. They need films that are acceptable, tolerable, and just good enough to keep subscribers paying. In a way, it’s a modern take on the “grindhouse” culture, where cheap theaters offered long sessions of back-to-back films, filling the slots with whatever they could find.
However, even in the grindhouse era, there were hidden gems. The “B-movie” label is a cultural classification, not a life sentence or a guarantee of low artistic value. “Project Power” might surprise you. Sure, the special effects look cheap, and the film is derivative, uneven, and not particularly smart. But for a good B-movie, those are often classic attributes. And “Project Power,” despite its flaws, is actually pretty good.
Like “Bright,” “Project Power” integrates a fantastical concept into a familiar genre template – not a buddy cop movie this time, but a story about an anti-hero with a dark past battling a powerful criminal organization (usually a drug cartel). Here, the “drug” is literally superpowers, and while that doesn’t fundamentally change the plot (you could easily imagine the same story without any superpowers), it completely transforms the film visually.
Action and Visuals Take Center Stage
The plot twists in “Project Power” are secondary to the adrenaline-fueled action and the visual effects. And that’s where the film shines. Forget the occasional CGI mishaps; the action sequences are acrobatic and narratively inventive. Each chase and fight cleverly incorporates a different superpower. One of the most impressive scenes, for example, is filmed through the glass of a chamber where a woman is slowly being frozen. It’s clear that the directors wanted to create something fun and creative, and that ambition alone makes “Project Power” worth watching.