Just six weeks after its release of the quarantine hit The Old Guard, Netflix digs into the big-budget action bag again with Project Power starring Jamie Foxx, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and rising star Dominique Fishback. Project Power is about a teenage drug dealer, police officer, and mysterious traveler whose paths collide as a pill that provides an unknown superpower to users for 5 minutes wreaks havoc on New Orleans. It sounds like 2011’s Limitless at first glance, but the time limit and unknown effects provide an intriguing twist. Does Project Power live up to the promise it teases or should the power trips be left to Bradley Cooper?
The on-screen talent for Project Power is an embarrassment of riches. Foxx once again shows he might be the most reliable actor of his generation and Gordon-Levitt brings a level of fun and charisma that keeps the film from going too dark. As satisfying as those performances were, Fishback outshines both of them.
The bulk of Project Power’s scenes rest on Fishback and she handles it beautifully. The film shuffles her Robin character through a variety of stages and Fishback’s ability to go from vulnerable to assertive to charming without missing a beat is a must-see. She is at her best when paired with Foxx and it makes for what might be the film’s most poignant scene as they discuss the relationship between power and the system to which we belong.
The behind-the-camera pieces aren’t as thorough as their acting counterparts. However, there is enough in those areas to warrant viewing the film as something beyond Limitless’s streaming cousin.
Writer Matt Tomlin’s script takes what could have easily been an outright, straightforward action film because of its adrenaline-driven premise and incorporates two tweaks to divert it from that course. First, he broke down the story from the perspectives of 3 distinct protagonists instead of a single one, which gave room for a more robust story. It mostly works, except for the fact that the Frank Shaver character has no definitive backstory and the Shaver-Robin relationship feels random and low-key inappropriate even for a customer-drug dealer dynamic.
Second, Tomlin exchanged the expected action scenes for more character-driven scenes that uniquely humanizes Project Power. He executed that by incorporating culturally significant references such as the failed Hurricane Katrina response, the unconsented use of Black people as experimental test subjects, and the disproportionate racial impact of the health care crisis. This tweak also works but occasionally feels misplaced because it distracts from the film’s exciting potential in favor of appearing more profound than it has to.
The directing team of Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost did an adequate job making a coherent film out of a script with all of those moving parts, but the action sequences are uneven. They could have shot and choreographed them more cleanly, but the special effects used to show the power drug’s impact balances things out.
Project Power is a film that has all the pieces to be another bar-setting hit for Netflix. The cast is excellent with solid performances from Foxx and Gordon-Levitt and what should be a career-altering performance from Fishback and there is solid writing and directing. It stops short of using its power to set that bar due to leaving too much out in favor of being more preachy than it should and not making the most of its action sequences. Project Power is still a pretty good watch, but you can’t help thinking about its limitless potential when it ends.
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