Curator Watchlist
A slick, high-concept action-crime thriller with a fun premise and some strong performances, but it mostly plays like a familiar superhero origin story without enough invention to fully cash in on its idea. Worth it if you want stylish, easygoing spectacle; less so if you’re looking for sharp worldbuilding or a… Read more
Where to watch: Buy
Fri · 1h 53m
Director: Ariel Schulman, Henry Joost
Starring: Jamie Foxx, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Dominique Fishback
An ex-soldier, a teen and a cop collide in New Orleans as they hunt for the source behind a dangerous new pill that grants users temporary superpowers.
Ariel Schulman, Henry Joost
Jamie Foxx, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Dominique Fishback
A slick, high-concept action-crime thriller with a fun premise and some strong performances, but it mostly plays like a familiar superhero origin story without enough invention to fully cash in on its idea. Worth it if you want stylish, easygoing spectacle; less so if you’re looking for sharp worldbuilding or a truly memorable sci-fi hook.
Project Power has a genuinely good hook: a black-market pill that grants random superpowers for five minutes is the kind of premise that should generate chaos, surprise, and memorable action. The movie does have flashes of that energy, along with a polished look and a cast that knows how to sell the material. Jamie Foxx brings weight, Joseph Gordon-Levitt adds some scrappy charm, and Dominique Fishback gives the film its best sense of urgency and personality.
The problem is that the movie keeps retreating into a very familiar chase-and-conspiracy structure. Instead of fully exploring the weirdness of the power pill, it settles for standard beats, standard villains, and standard emotional turns. The result is competent but rarely exciting, like a better-than-average pilot for a franchise that never quite arrives.
Still, there’s enough craft here to make it an easy recommendation for viewers who want a polished genre piece without much homework. If you go in expecting a clever B-movie with occasional bursts of invention, it can work. If you want the premise to really explode, it mostly just smolders.
demi adejuyigbe · 1123 likes
Cool visuals! Perfect movie to put on in the background while you do something else. Is Casey Neistat contractually obligated to be offered a role in every movie made for Gen Z? Movies should not be allowed to use the line “This isn’t a movie, this is real life.”
Patrick Willems (2.5★) · 622 likes
The message I got from this is that most super powers suck and half of them apparently kill you
Frandi Peralta · 460 likes
Joseph Gordon-levitt is back!!!😁❤️
matt lynch (3★) · 277 likes
Genuinely surprised to find this perfectly adequate for an X-MEN knockoff. Some of the powers were neat, there were occasional bites of visually-inventive action, it's generally pretty, and Foxx is fun to watch. The execution of the subtext about disenfranchised communities being used as guinea pigs is pretty tin-eared, but also it absolutely belongs here, so I'd rather have it than not.
George Clark (2.5★) · 185 likes
2020 Releases Ranked-HERE Project Power is a 2020 American science fiction/superhero film directed by Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost and stars Jamie Foxx, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Dominique Fishback, Machine Gun Kelly, Rodrigo Santoro and Amy Landecker. The films storyline follows a police officer, former soldier and drug dealer as they team up to stop the distribution of a pill that gives the user superpowers for five minutes. I’m a simple film lover, I’ve got a critical side and a fan side… more
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black-market drugs, temporary superpowers, crime conspiracy, police and vigilante partnership, urban decay, corporate exploitation, disenfranchised communities, science fiction action
superhero-adjacent, crime thriller, science fiction, action, New Orleans, drug conspiracy, urban noir, streaming-era, anti-corporate, genre mashup