Monday, August 17, 2020

Project Power

Title: Project Power
Directed by: Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman
Screenplay by: Mattson Tomlin
Network: Netflix

Another solid 4/10 effort by the masters of mediocre at Netflix. A stereotypical group of government black hats test a drug which gives you superpowers for precisely 5 minutes (regardless of your body mass, what you recently ate or other factors because that’s the way drugs work) on the unsuspecting inhabitants of New Orleans. The power might be cool, like super-strength or invulnerability, or very uncool, like suddenly making your insides outsides.

It’s up to a plucky teenager (Dominique Fishback), cop who always wears a football jersey (Joseph-Gordon-Samuel-Johnson-Rasputin-Sputnik-Spam-Spam-Spam-Lyle-Levitt) and a badass (Jamie Foxx) to stop them.

In keeping with Netflix’s tradition of splurging on a big-name actor or two and skimping on just about everything else, aside from the leads everything here is pretty dire. Continuity is out the window—people magically know where other people are, items appear and disappear with leprechaun abandon. The three potential bad guys are barely in the movie and have little impact on the plot, other than the one named “Biggie” who obviously has the best name.

The script can’t decide what the central super-drug conceit is an allegory or metaphor for: government and police corruption, the war on drugs, exploitation of the poor, or what? As a result, characters will toss out the odd line about hard it is to be a poor black woman in America today, and then the movie has fuckall else to say about the subject.

Speaking of dialog, since we’re not a professional website here, allow me to reproduce one scene for your reading delectation:

Jamie Foxx: What do you want to be when you grow up?
Dominique: A rapper
J: No, you cannot rap
D: I can
J: I refuse to believe in your capacity to rap
D: I demand a trial of my capacity to rap
J: No, it is impossible
D: (raps)
J: I am astounded and amazed at your ability to rap

The cinematography (by Michael Simmonds) is arty without purpose. A fight scene is shot entirely from within a 360 glass chamber whose windows are frosting over, while the fight rages outside. This foregrounds the irrelevant frosting over, while obscuring the dramatically relevant fighting. Elsewhere we get crazy off-kilter angles, extreme rack zooms, incredible close-ups of people’s left eyeballs as they look at something over their shoulder, none of which really conveys any dramatic or emotional information. Just there to look cool.

Stuff should be in the movie for a reason. Either to impart information, or deliver an emotion, something, anything. There's a lot in this movie that is just kind of there. Take the above-mentioned 5-minute superpower limit. Aha, you think, a ticking clock. This will play a role in the big climactic showdown. Only no, it doesn't. It has about as much bearing on the plot as Dominique being a young black woman.

Foxx is watchable and charming, even though he struggles with some of the cornier lines, Lovett is barely in the movie and Fishback is fun to watch in the quiet scenes with Foxx (when she’s not proving how badass she is by rapping), but wasted in the action sequences.