It’s about a pill that grants the swallower five minutes of super powers, only no one knows what power they’re going to get until they try it – it’s like Airheads White Mystery – some people just explode. It’s Limitless with some serious limits. The pills themselves are cool, they look like they have little nebulas in them, but I find the five minute time restriction extremely odd. It makes the whole thing seem rather silly. Five minutes is no time at all. You know those other movies about super heroes? Well, this one’s different because it’s about temporary superheroes. The tagline is “What would you risk for five minutes of pure power?” It’s an interesting question, and the answer is, not much man it’s five fucking minutes.
Project Power, directed by Ariel Shulman and Henry Joost, was released on Netflix on 14 August 2020 and stars Jamie Foxx, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Dominique Fishback. Foxx plays an ex-army major called The Major who survived an early testing phase of the Power Pill, but passed some of its lingering effects down to his daughter. The defense contractor responsible for creating the pill, learns of the girl’s abilities and kidnaps her. The bulk of the film is The Major working his way up the supply chain to find her. He enlists the help of low level dealer, Robin (Fishback), and Frank (Levitt), a cop who wants to use the drug to fight the drug. Jamie Foxx SHOULD be investigating why the excellent Courtney B. Vance appears as JGL’s precinct captain in an early scene and then is never heard from again. That’s what I want to know.
The powers themselves are underwhelming. One guy gets bulletproof skin. A useful ability, provided you can schedule your shooting for that brief five minute window. There’s a guy who’s sort of invisible. Another who I think is supposed to be like Wolverine when he had the bone claws but who hews more closely to Beetlejuice on his way to the whorehouse. There’s the dude who sets himself on fire, but doesn’t fly or anything like Human Torch, he’s just on fire.
About two thirds of the way in, we’re told the powers come from animals, but I can’t think of any animals who set themselves on fire. There’s a scene where Jamie Foxx tells us that the pistol shrimp is the most powerful animal on the planet because its attack produces cavitation bubbles that reach over 7,000 degrees celsius as they collapse, and while I think it’s fabulous I got to watch a real scene in a real movie where tough guy Jamie Foxx teaches us about the pistol shrimp, I’d like to give a shout out to the mantis shrimp because it does the cavitation bubble thing in addition to having the most complex visual system in the animal kingdom AND looking like the world’s craziest Pride float.
The cast is solid. Fishback was the most interesting, I’d never seen her in anything before. Foxx and JGL do their thing. The movie is fine. There are some fun fights, just be prepared to suspend your disbelief from a tall building.
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