Netflix's Project Power Review

The latest game news from IGN - one of my fave channels ever - check it out Project Power debuts exclusively on Netflix on August 14. [poilib element="accentDivider"] Filmmakers Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, who first rose to prominence as the directors of Catfish, and later established themselves in the Paranormal Activity franchise, have entered into the domain of superheroes. On its face, their action flick Project Power reads as an intriguing reinvention. The concept: People are now capable of gaining superhuman ability through a magic pill called Power. A roulette wheel, before taking the pill, they don’t know what ability they’ll receive: invisibility, thermodynamics, stretch, or even invulnerability. However, stipulations and dangers do exist: Their power only lasts for five minutes and in some cases, if someone overdoses, their body explodes. Sounds reasonable. These drugs are supplied by showy governmental and medical forces, and are sold by dealers like Newt (Machine Gun Kelly, who has little to chew on) and Robin (Dominique Fishback). The latter often sells to Frank (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a New Orleans detective ingesting the pills in a bid to level the playing field against the rising breed of superhuman criminals. They’re joined by The Major (Jamie Foxx), an ex-military specialist in search of his daughter (Kyanna Simone Simpson), after her abduction by a government trying to harness her natural superhuman abilities. Project Power wears its influences to an aching degree. During a drug bust involving teens, Frank does his best Dirty Harry impression when he asks, “You’ve gotta ask yourself one question: What is your power?” When The Major and Robin team together, Robin exclaims, “We’re like Batman and Robin.” No scene passes without a clear homage to the film’s setting in New Orleans: The voices of local disc jockeys announcing local crime updates decorate the soundscape; Frank wears a jersey of former Saints player Steve Gleason; and Mattson Tomlin’s clunky dialogue repeatedly refers to an ongoing Saints game. Such wonkiness obtusely extends to The Major telling Robin, “You’re young. You’re Black. You’re a woman. The system is designed to swallow you whole.” Subtlety needn’t apply in Project Power. [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2020/07/24/netflixs-project-power-exclusive-clip-headshot-comic-conhome-on-ign-live"] The overt carries over to the film’s visual aspects, as well. Cinematographer Michael Simmonds loves throwing in canted angles with little regard for the desired effect. When Biggie (Rodrigo Santoro) introduces Project Power to a host of young drug dealers led by Newt, a lower angle shot employs the harshest rack focus — from Biggie to the pill in his hand — I’ve ever seen. The over-stylized cinematography and composition, aiming for a visceral tone, does the fight choreography no favors. For instance, when The Major crashes a secretive high-stakes demonstration of Power, a fight ensues between himself and Biggie’s henchmen. During the melee, a woman inside a glass cylinder begs for her escape as she turns into ice. The camera tracks the action from inside the icy glass prison. To shoot one of the film’s most important sequences, when The Major finally meets a prominent villain, from the perspective of a peripheral character, at an angle which obscurs the sharp gunplay and fight choreography to the squint of the eye, suggests an absence of visual discernment. By aiming for refinement, Project Power lacks any. Instead the action relies on gratuitous violence and inarticulate uses of handheld. The single saving grace is the slick VFX work portraying abilities, such as invisibility and thermodynamics, with clarity. These shortcomings are compounded by a convoluted script lacking a true villain. Between Biggie, a bearded henchman named Wallace (Tait Fletcher), and the evil doctor Gardner (Amy Landecker), I don’t know who to root against because none of them occupies an important space. Other smaller frustrations abound: tacky protestetic beards, obvious switches to body doubles, and how the incredibly talented Courtney B. Vance is relegated to a few short scenes as a police captain. But the gravest error in the superhero flick springs from the opaqueness of its central theme: the appropriation of disadvantaged Black and Brown people for medical experimentation. The history of the medical community using marginalized people as guinea pigs runs deep. For instance, the film references Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman during the 1930’s whose cells were illegitimately harvested by doctors, and later cloned for drug testing. Other examples left unnamed in the film include the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and the forced sterilization of Puerto Rican, Mexican, and Native American women throughout the decades. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=netflix-spotlight-august-2020&captions=true"] The distrust felt by Black and Brown people toward the medical community continues to this day, especially with regards to Black people disbelieving the medical community with regards to the Covid-19 pandemic. When combined with a New Orleans still reeling from Hurricane Katrina, and the racial inequality instituted by the federal government during the crisis, the socio-economic importance should’ve granted a stronger pull. However, Project Power buries the relevant themes under the weight of action muscle. Project Power’s lone bright spot is the dynamic between Foxx and Fishback. The pair develop a surrogate father-daughter relationship grown by way of an antagonistic double act. Foxx gives even the dorkiest line a sense of purpose while Fishback imbues the stylistic action flick with a semblance of emotional substance. The subplot involving Robin’s diabetic mother - though it’s odd that a veterinarian doesn’t have health insurance - is sweet on the surface, but fades below the monotonous action. While her dreams of becoming a rapper aim for legitimacy, the storyline rarely rises above needless fluff. Fishback evoking any of these odd tangents into any emotional believability is staggering. Especially given the cheeseball ending.

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