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  • Writer's pictureRoman Arbisi

Review: Project Power (2020)


Considering the current state of affairs and our turn towards streaming services to supply us with ample entertainment, it’s exhausting to see a movie this bad after spending months not being in a theater.


Project Power is a new Netflix Original starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jamie Foxx, and Dominique Fishback in a movie that takes the war on drugs to super heights. A drug that gives their consumer a unique power for six minutes to harness incredible abilities. For some, this means being set aflame, turning into a physical popsicle, or maybe even imploding upon immediate consumption. What directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman do with this admittedly interesting premise is a complete mess on all accounts.


To begin on a positive note (because I apparently spend too much time dabbling in stuff I don’t like), well... there isn’t much to say beyond it’s brief moments of a movie that this should have been. For some apparent reason this movie hoards the most generic and clumped up clichés. Especially when it actively takes a moment or two to allow Dominique Fishback’s freestyling, Robin, to resemble the equivalent of “our true power being within us”. Her talents are extraordinary, lyrically eloquent, and she can stop on a dime at any time to spit a rhyme. Her performance is quite good, and what she resembles is earnest and genuine. There is a movie in here that is tailor made for her story, unfortunately they choose to be a lazy, ultimately uninspired sci-fi action thriller, because that’s what most audience members like?

I’m not sure it’s worth spending as much time on this as I already have, but I have to wonder who this was for? I’ve questioned Netflix’s strategy for beefing up it’s catalogue for what seems like decades, and this is so artificial and on brand for the studio that brought you Extraction and Spenser Confidential in the same calendar year. Two Netflix titans of viewership that amount to the lowest hanging fruit of entertainment to fill in a gap for two hours before you move on with your life. The most eye-rolling aspect of this production is that it has two of some of my favorite entertainers in the modern era. For Foxx and JGL they both are creative geniuses who offer up a variety of talents behind and in front of the cameras, and their talents are completely wasted here. JGL lurks around in what seems like an oversized Steve Gleason jersey in case you forgot the movie takes place in New Orleans (which the movie seems to forget sometimes as well), and Foxx is given the most shallow and uninviting dialogue to work with. Two incredible talents reduced down to characters that could have been played by anyone.


Beyond star talent being wasted, the camera and direction may as well have been charged with a DUI as well. For example; There is a long take fight sequence around the hour mark set in a room where the evil mustache villain basically says that he’s The Lizard from The Amazing Spider-Man, and he showcases the drug taking form on a test subject in a chamber. This is a neat looking set and it comes during a pivotal action scene in the movie. Instead of the camera attaching itself to what is supposed to get our blood pumping, it chooses to place itself inside the chamber as it freezes up and spins around as Foxx indistinguishably kills some bad guys. The immediate subject of the scene is the least interesting part of the scene, and everything worth looking at is relegated to the background which signals that the directors feel it isn’t that important enough to watch. Had they flipped the camera to the room outside the chamber and the test subject’s death from the pill taking over, you create so much more kineticism for your sequencing in an instant. The most exciting aspect of the sequence is front and center, and the added environmental changes in the background create a thrilling sense of space, geography, and most importantly, confidence. The worst part about all of this is that when the take ends you can feel that they thought it was the coolest thing ever. Which is really upsetting because Extraction felt the same way and it means that the art of the long take is being reduced to “well we did this unbroken shot so it’s cool, I hope you clapped”.

All in all, Project Power is a shambling, directionless mishap from beginning to end. It opens up the Netflix box and just reuses all the hand me downs at their disposal and poses as some super hip and millennial friendly movie. It went ahead and borrowed the Stranger Things soundtrack, wrapped some lights in neon-lite cellophane, got some hot Hollywood names to draw eyes to it, and structured a few tweets for the Netflix Film account to sprinkle some emojis on a clip starring MGK. This is the type of movie that concerns me because of how resolutely hopeless the whole thing is, and if movie theaters struggled to exist as we once knew them, then this is bad news if this is the best form of entertainment they can give us. Which I wouldn’t be too harsh on if Netflix didn’t position every quarter of the year to have one or two of these to salivate our tastes for something worthwhile when they continuously produce stuff that isn’t.


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