Netflix’s ‘Project Power’ Delivers a Ludicrously Fun Dose of Summer Escapism 

Alci Rengifo

It has been a summer devoid of superheroes due to the endless delays in major releases because of the pandemic. So here comes Jamie Foxx to try and save the day with “Project Power,” a Netflix original movie that barely stops to take a breath. Directed by not one, but two, directors, it’s an expensive exercise in absolute silliness. You can admire its budget and talented cast, even as they run, shoot, punch and jump through a formula plot based purely on action. It’s as deep as a throwaway comic book, but hits the sweet spot of popcorn guilty pleasure.

We are back somewhere in the near future. The streets of New Orleans are being flooded with an exotic pill that awakens a superpower inside whoever takes it. Not everyone’s power is the same, some are more fun or pleasant than others, and the effect only lasts five minutes. Selling the stuff on the street is Robin (Dominique Fishback), a working class high schooler who nurtures a rapper’s talent, even as teachers scoff at her bad grades. Her extracurricular activity brings her into contact with Art (Foxx), a stranger trained in combat, who is hunting down the source of the drug to find his missing daughter. Art demands Robin help him get to the heart of the drug’s distribution. This also brings him into the path of Frank (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a detective who wants to clean the streets (although he himself uses the drug). Their first major target is Biggie (Rodrigo Santoro), a local drug lord trying to cut a lucrative deal with, of course, a big Mexican cartel. 

“Project Power” is the kind of movie where it’s better not to ask too many questions about how its drug even works. Like “Bloodshot” earlier this year, the idea is simply a catalyst for its style. Directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman are experts at quick-consumption entertainment. Their credits as a duo include “Catfish” and “Paranormal Activity” parts 3 and 4. They put a lot of thought into the visual environment of “Project Power,” making sure to capture Black working class life in New Orleans while evoking gritty streets and neon-lit nights. There are moments of over-the-top production design, yet still fun to look at, like a bar with a large, transparent dragon for pouring drinks. The editing moves with a frantic, kinetic pace. One action scene seamlessly flows into another. Art finds Biggie at an underground bar where he is showing off the drug to a cartel buyer, a shootout ensues, cut to a small car chase, then we take a break for some expository dialogue with Robin (or the need to stitch up someone’s gunshot wound), and off we go into the next bit of adrenaline rush. Joost and Schulman, with the real MVP of the movie, Michael Simmonds, focus on how to give every shot gloss. It isn’t quite “John Wick,” but the spirit is the same in how aesthetic surpasses any need for deeper logic here. Some movies obviously influenced by comic book culture have the curious flaw falling into stale designs, as if the filmmakers try too hard to go “dark.” This is a dark film, but with a lively look. When characters consume the drug their skin glows, eyes nearly pop, or someone turns into a charred version of the Human Torch. 

It also helps that writer Matt Tomlin, who recently penned Matt Reeves’s upcoming “The Batman,” gives his heroes enough of a clear objective. Art wants to find his daughter, Frank wants to clean the streets, Robin wants to make a better life for her and her mother. Their journey uncovers a secret government project involving using New Orleans as a testing ground for the drug, and why Art’s daughter was kidnapped is later revealed with a twist both typical but workable. A lot of the plot involving the superpowers drug is ridiculous, especially since we never get a sense of how people suddenly having powers, even for just five minutes, would spread some real chaos not just in New Orleans, but anywhere. This is of course, why Biggie wants to sell it to the progressively imagined female cartel boss who flies in from down south. One feels Tomlin was having fun inventing all these scenarios as excuses for the movie’s entertaining, extended sequences, like a woman used as a lab rat for the drug. She takes a pill within an encased space, then turns into a kind of arctic being before everything explodes into an action scene outside, the camera doing a long tracking shot as her anatomy goes haywire, while bullets and fists fly around. Frank’s power when he takes the pill is that he becomes bulletproof, which lets the filmmakers play with close-ups of bullets slamming into his cheek without going through. 

For most of the movie Jamie Foxx doesn’t have any superpowers for reasons explained soon enough, but as always, as he has a great look for these pounding action numbers. Foxx also brings some welcome, low key humor to the role as well. Dominique Fishback is also a standout as Robin, showing off her rapping skills to rhymes put together by rising MC Chika (who makes a cameo as one of Robin’s classmates). Gordon-Levitt does his usual, somber with a subtle grin role, as if his cop from “The Dark Knight Rises” has hit middle age with a secret drug habit.

For streamers, “Project Power” will bring a dose of the kind of silly, popcorn entertainment we tend to relish in more normal summers, when this would play a multiplex.  It also doesn’t overstay its welcome, like other, recent Netflix action romps like “Extraction” or the two-and-a-half-hour “The Last Days of American Crime.” Instead, this is an example of great actors and crafty filmmakers pulling off a preposterous premise. It’s a welcome escape, now more than ever.

“Project Power” begins streaming Aug. 14 on Netflix.