Looks like my superhero jones is sticking around, so let’s look a film that takes that idea rather literally: Superpowers as drugs. It’s something tied into the darker aspects of a world with superpowers, where the option of taking a pill to get your own power set becomes a dilemma of whether you’d survive the trip and, more pointedly, what kind of person you’d become in the aftermath. ‘Power corrupts’ as the saying goes, and with this Nawlins-set sci-fi thriller about a new drug that gives the user a superpower for five minutes, quite a few questions get brought up. Not a lot of them get answered, though.
Within the realms of my severe weakness for superhero yarns, it’s this specific type that really gets me going. The cops-and-superpowered-robbers, street-level, “what if superpowers existed in our modern reality?” deconstruction shit, the kind that gave TV series like Heroes, Misfits and (my personal favourite) The 4400 their edge. Of course, what makes those shows work within the superhero framework is down to creativity: Either they thought outside the box in terms of what actually constitutes a ‘superpower’ (e.g., in 4400, they featured someone who could make the human body oxidize like metal), or tweaked what should be a useless power into something powerful (like the guy who could control dairy products with his mind in Misfits).
In Project Power, the powers themselves are animal-based, and while they dip into one or two cool ideas, it largely amounts to the same strength/endurance/speed accessories. The filmmakers admittedly do well enough with the staging to make even that much work for them, as the effects work combined with the action beats are quite thrilling (and an appearance from a literally-flaming MGK was a welcome surprise), but it really would’ve helped if there was some genuine variety, something fresh that I hadn’t already seen in an issue of Animal Man.
But merely being derivative isn’t even the issue; hell, I’m under the impression that those aforementioned shows spoiled me a bit with just how creative they could get with superpowers. Where this film really hits a low note is with the realisation that the most engaging and creative stuff found here? It could have just as easily been done without the superpowers around it. And in some cases, like the relationship between high school drug dealer Robin (Dominique Fishback) and cop Frank (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), it would’ve worked better in a standard crime-thriller setting, as it would mean that the idea of a cop buying drugs off a teenager (pushing 30 IRL, but nevertheless) would be given more examination than it just… happening. Ditto for the teen selling in the first place.
It also dips into areas of Big Pharma commentary, similar to
The Old Guard, except it ends up being so razor-thin that it only gets as far
as showing the New Orleans populace as guinea pigs for this drug, something
that would’ve landed better if the attempts to reference government intervention after Hurricane Katrina wasn't relegated to a single throwaway line of dialogue.
I’d say it’s what I’ve come to expect from the directors of Nerve, but quite frankly, internet life post-GG has made me at least willing to give that film another shot. Not something I’m likely to do here, though, as this is basically a superhero thriller that isn’t sure if it even needed to be about superheroes in the first place. At best, it nudges themes and ideas that other shows (and comic books) have already examined and with greater depth. At worst, it feels embarrassed to be in its own sub-genre, as it might have given the solid acting pedigree, their decent characterisation, and the apparent core idea of drug culture and the systems that allow it to flourish and actually take effect if this were just about drug dealing in New Orleans. As it stands, though, it’s cut with too much unnecessary product to be worth recommending.
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