Netflix Film: Project Power (2020) Superpower film Starring Jamie Foxx & Joseph Gordon-Levitt

EPDC

El Pirate Del Caribe
BGOL Investor
I liked it. I would’ve watched it in the theater with movie pass and felt good about it. I liked old guard better but Netflix got some good movies.
Netflix has been doing their thing with their originals.

Bright
Spenser Confidential
Extraction
Old Guard
Project Power..

Sheeit, I even like the "In The Shadow of the Moon" flick from last year.
 

cincitystudios

Chopping it up
BGOL Investor
Netflix has been doing their thing with their originals.

Bright
Spenser Confidential
Extraction
Old Guard
Project Power..

Sheeit, I even like the "In The Shadow of the Moon" flick from last year.

Never heard of in the shadow but I will check that out. Yeah I liked all of those other movies. I liked Bright the best out of all of them.
 

publicenemy

Rising Star
BGOL Investor

Project Power Is a Depressingly Uninspired Off-Brand Superhero Story
By Alison Willmore
Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Dominique Fishback, and Jamie Foxx star in a would-be Netflix blockbuster with a clever premise and crummy follow through. Photo: Netflix
It’s been a while since I’ve felt as cheated by a movie as I did by Project Power when, immediately after unleashing superpower-enabling drugs on New Orleans, it pulled a “Six Weeks Later.” The substance, which comes in a twist-activated capsule containing what looks like a glowing nebula, temporarily unlocks a special ability in everyone who takes it and doesn’t immediately blow up (an admittedly discouraging side effect that plagues a small percentage of users). It’s off-brand X-Men with a time limit, but there’s also a chaotically democratic quality to the premise that sets it apart. For the price of a pill, anyone can have five minutes of access to whatever their particular talent turns out to be — say, exaggerated strength, or camouflaging skin, or the ability to project bone shards through one’s flesh to use as weapons. The drug’s essentially being product-tested on the poor, but that also means that’s who has access to it, an upending of power dynamics that means dozens of regular people get bursts of access to extraordinary capabilities. And what does the movie do? It consigns this period to a 911 call map, and then rushes instead to tell another tale of characters defeating baddies and saving the day.
Project Power, which was written by Mattson Tomlin and directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman (of the Catfish doc, and more recently, Nerve), stakes out a spot on the gritty outskirts of the superhero genre, with blood and profanity and a character played by Machine Gun Kelly.
General lameness of the powers aside, there’s a streak of body horror to how they work, what with the transformations leaving visible scars on some users, and the woman with a cold-generating ability who breaks off a finger after her hand freezes to the ground. But there’s nothing edgy about the story it tells, which hurtles past so many more fertile possibilities to focus on a detective named Frank (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a plucky teenager named Robin (Dominique Fishback), and a ex-military man with a secret named Art (Jamie Foxx). They eventually come together to rescue the city, from itself as much as from the nefarious corporation that turns out to be behind the product. The drug, as its primary salesman Biggie (Rodrigo Santoro) pitches it, “will topple governments” — but in the film, its potential only seems to fuel a crime wave that has at least one policeman taking the pills himself to keep up.

That would be Frank, whose power is bulletproof skin and whose heart is gold, which we know because he gifts his supplier, Robin, with a bike from the impound lot. Robin’s heart is similarly gilded — she’s only slinging pills to pay for her diabetic mother’s surgery. This fails to garner her any sympathy from Art when he rolls into town trying to find the source of the drugs, though he too turns out to have a personal motivation. Of the actors playing these bluntly written characters, each with a moral checkmark, only Fishback (coming off a run on The Deuce) manages to do more than trudge through the 111-minute runtime. She allows Robin a pragmatic skepticism in the face of rote promises about the rewards of keeping her head down and staying in school. But what’s appealing about Robin is not the redemptive choices that she inevitably gets pulled toward — it’s her disheartened normalcy. She’s just a girl who’s trying to get by, and who’s stumbled on a way to do it by way of hawking a mysterious substance that allows people to access their animal DNA or whatever. It’d be infinitely more interesting to explore Robin’s relationship with her dirtbag cousin Newt (Kelly), a full-time dealer who develops the ability to thermoregulate into a ball of fire and whose preferred meeting place is Church’s Chicken.
But Newt burns out after an uninspired encounter in a terrific location — a battered apartment complex in Woodmere where the characters are able to jump through holes in the floors and walls. We’re left instead with cops and soldiers who serve as real and surrogate dads, all intent on setting the world aright as though that were a straightforward task. The trouble with trying to push at the boundaries of the superhero genre isn’t that we’re out of material, it’s that imaginations are so limited that a film that starts with a twist on a familiar premise nevertheless loops around to a standard showdown involving an incoherent blur of computer generated effects. Project Power only has one memorable action sequence, involving a fight happening through the glass of a tank, but it grinds dutifully through plenty of other set-pieces anyway. It shears superheroics away from operatic origin stories and dichotomies of good and evil, then drifts back toward those ideas as though lost without them. It’s a film that’s more frustrating for the promising aspects it sets to the side — like the textures of the city in which it takes place, or the details of the life its youngest character is leading. Or, for that matter, all the fun, dumb, dangerous, inspired things that could have happened in those first six weeks, had the movie not cut away.
ION give a fuck about this review, Imma still watch it.:hmm:
 

EPDC

El Pirate Del Caribe
BGOL Investor
ION give a fuck about this review, Imma still watch it.:hmm:
Fuck that review. Mufucking reviewers always trying to breakdown every movie to pieces, analyzing scenes, color theory, and subtleties, but won't sit back and enjoy a fucking action movie for giving them a good story and action.

This film showed government fuckery over treatment of New Orleans post Katrina, and gave a new twist to the drug war tying it to experimentations on the poor in NO.

All that and the fact that the writers had the balls to mention Henrietta Lacks name all while keeping the white character more of a background character and not front and center makes this a fucking win for me.
 

woodchuck

A crowd pleasing man.
OG Investor
Fuck that review. Mufucking reviewers always trying to breakdown every movie to pieces, analyzing scenes, color theory, and subtleties, but won't sit back and enjoy a fucking action movie for giving them a good story and action.

This film showed government fuckery over treatment of New Orleans post Katrina, and gave a new twist to the drug war tying it to experimentations on the poor in NO.

All that and the fact that the writers had the balls to mention Henrietta Lacks name all while keeping the white character more of a background character and not front and center makes this a fucking win for me.
A lot of reviewers are frustrated writers, and that's why they do that.
 
Last edited:

Aww Skeet Skeet!

The antithesis of nonsense.
BGOL Investor
Because this is a porn board after all...
1519680530_1519381435_1509638036_001.jpg


Damn, what movie/play is this?
 

tekwehuself

Immigrant Expat
International Member
Fuck that review. Mufucking reviewers always trying to breakdown every movie to pieces, analyzing scenes, color theory, and subtleties, but won't sit back and enjoy a fucking action movie for giving them a good story and action.

This film showed government fuckery over treatment of New Orleans post Katrina, and gave a new twist to the drug war tying it to experimentations on the poor in NO.

All that and the fact that the writers had the balls to mention Henrietta Lacks name all while keeping the white character more of a background character and not front and center makes this a fucking win for me.

All this
 

TheAlias

Rising Star
BGOL Patreon Investor
I don't know...the rapping and the Michael Bay type action lost me.

Had potential. Wish another director got his (or her) hands on it.
 

woodchuck

A crowd pleasing man.
OG Investor
Uncle Chuck trying to get work as jaime stand in.
They were scouting this old church by my house, and the head scout happened to see our house on the way back to the office, so he sent an assistant back and asked us if it was okay. She took pictures of the interior and the exterior, and since our bottom floor is more or less an open-concept, she said interior shots would be possible. We'll see.
 

playahaitian

Rising Star
Certified Pussy Poster
They were scouting this old church by my house, and the head scout happened to see our house on the way back to the office, he sent an assistant back and asked us if it was okay. She took pictures of the interior and the exterior, and since our bottom floor is more or less an open-concept, she said interior shots would be possible. We'll see.

Who you need me to call to get you a soundtrack placement Unc?
 

Black A. Camus

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
I'm surprised how much I liked this. I like Jamie Foxx, but I never thought he was a good actor: he typically projects too much pride and arrogance in his roles. He toned it down a lot, and made his character believable. The storyline and action in this film were good. I liked it.
 

Tito_Jackson

Truth Teller
Registered
Saw this as movie night last night with the fam. We really liked it. Not sure where the hate is coming from.
 
Last edited:

TimRock

Don't let me be misunderstood
BGOL Investor
It was cool. Wanted to see better fight or at least more action from dude that turned into the giant, but it was cool. I'd watch it again
 

PliggaNease

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
Fuck that review. Mufucking reviewers always trying to breakdown every movie to pieces, analyzing scenes, color theory, and subtleties, but won't sit back and enjoy a fucking action movie for giving them a good story and action.

This film showed government fuckery over treatment of New Orleans post Katrina, and gave a new twist to the drug war tying it to experimentations on the poor in NO.

All that and the fact that the writers had the balls to mention Henrietta Lacks name all while keeping the white character more of a background character and not front and center makes this a fucking win for me.
Bruh, you summed up all my thoughts. Especially that last paragraph.
 
Top