2020 has been a really weird year for movies. First off, the House of Mouse was taking a down year, with only “Black Widow” from Marvel on the schedule and Star Wars on a hiatus for a bit. That meant that we finally were going to have a year where some other studios could get a bit of good buzz for their films… Then, Coronavirus came in and blew that up. Now, we are stuck with a bunch of crazy documentaries and Netflix movies they’ve been sitting on for a bit to keep us entertained. Today, I am going to be watching an example of the latter with “Project Power”, a film that looks like a cross between “Limitless” and “Training Day”, where apparently Jamie Foxx and Joseph Gordon Levitt can gain superpowers by taking a pill. I really don’t know anything about this one beyond the trailer, so I’m going to watch and see what its about, then report back. Here is the trailer.
2 hours later…
Ok, so here’s the bottom line before we go into more detail… This movie isn’t horrible. It does seem like the kind of movie a studio would just dump onto Netflix because they don’t think it would be successful on the big screen (which might be fair), but a successful movie has to hit on a lot of different levels, one of which is ensuring the medium fits the movie. The plot bears a lot in common with superhero movies, but to try and compare this to an MCU or even a DCEU film is not fair to this one. This is really its own type of thing, and for being a Netflix action movie, I think it does pretty well. I haven’t seen “Extraction” or “The Old Guard” yet, but I definitely think this beats out Will Smith’s “Bright” (2017).
I definitely don’t mean to go on a rant about made-for-streaming movies, but they really ought to be categorized separately in everyone’s mind. Sure, these aren’t generally movies that are going to blow you away in the graphics department, but they also are made on a fraction of the budget of big screen films. You also get access to them through a monthly subscription that costs about the same amount as a standard ticket to the theater, so perhaps you ought to check yo-self before grading them too harshly. And in 2020, when essentially all new movies are sidelined, these at least are something new we can all talk about. So, enjoy them for the lower budget movies they are. That’s the end of my rant…
Let’s start with the cast, and our three leads. First, Jamie Foxx is a fun actor to watch. I don’t know how he has any business being as enjoyable as he is, but its great. Every movie he is in is elevated above the script, and that is definitely the case here. He definitely isn’t an actor where I’d watch the movie only because he is in the thing, but he most certainly is a positive to a cast. He is enjoyable in this one as a father of a child with powers after he was experimented on prior to her being born.
Next, Joseph Gordon Levitt… I’ve already noted in my “Premium Rush” blog that I’m a fan, so I am not going to go super in-depth with that. I don’t know where he has been for the past 3 years, but I’m glad he is back and acting. He does well in this one as a New Orleans police detective who is trying to get the “power pills” off the street and make his city safer.
Finally, let’s talk Dominique Fishback. I’ve never seen her before this movie, and looking at her IMDB page, that makes sense. She seems to be in a bunch of movies that are just not marketed towards me. She is fine in this movie; she doesn’t quite hold her own against Foxx and Levitt, but she is pretty young and that is a skill that generally seems to come with time.
I think it makes sense to talk a bit about the setting here too. New Orleans is a pretty cool city, especially when you are talking about areas not directly related to Mardi Gras. It’s really interesting to see an urban area be a setting for a movie, and that city not be New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago. We need more movies that venture away from those coastal areas in order to allow for some much needed variety in our movie-going experiences. (I realize that New Orleans can be considered “coastal”, but I am specifically talking about the East or West coastal areas where it seems 90% of movies take place.)
When it comes to the basic story, I thought it was pretty original. A sketchy company isn’t allowed to test their super-power drug legally, so they decide to market it as an illegal drug in New Orleans to enable drug addicts to test it for them. The source of the drug is Jamie Foxx’s daughter, who naturally has powers. So, Jamie Foxx is trying to rescue his daughter while JGL is trying to clean up the streets. To be honest, I dug the underlying concept.
The art design was pretty good too, in my opinion. The superpowers are all animal-based (if you don’t think about it too hard) and I think how they made those superpowers was pretty good considering what I assume is a lower budget than most Hollywood productions.
What I generally think this movie lacks is writing, direction, and cinematography. The dialogue between actors doesn’t really work in most scenarios, which can be a bit jarring. The direction of the scenes wasn’t quite as “tight” as you’d like to see either, which led to a few pacing issues in the stretch. But what I think was most apparent to me was the cinematography. With the exception of once scene where we are essentially watching a woman become an ice-cube in the foreground with Jamie Foxx going on a gory killing spree in the background, everything just seemed to be filmed with pretty boring camera angles and fairly mundane lighting. I am certainly not a professional, but it just didn’t seem like it measured up to a lot of the competition.
So to summarize my thoughts on “Project Power”, I like the cast, I like the concept, and I thought the design choices were smart. I’m not high on the dialogue, direction, or cinematography. I don’t think it is a great film, but it definitely isn’t a bad one. I would recommend this movie if you are looking for something new to watch and are looking for actors you’ve enjoyed in the past. If I had to give this a grade, I’d give it a solid B+.
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