Project Power

Dirs: Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman (1hr 53mins) (15)

★★★

Brimming with “explosions, overturned cars and actors making the veins on their necks twitch as they exchange gunfire”, Project Power is the sort of “cheerfully ludicrous” blockbuster many film fans have been missing this summer, said Ed Power in The Daily Telegraph. In nearfuture New Orleans, a street drug, Power, grants its users superhero-like abilities for five minutes. The catch is that you don’t know what your superpower will be – and clumsy use of it might kill you. Even so, criminals keep popping the pills to help them commit robberies. Enter Frank (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a Dirty Harrylike cop who becomes a user himself in order to take them on. He has identified Art (Jamie Foxx) as Power’s main dealer. In fact, this former soldier, the survivor of a nefarious black-ops programme, is himself on the trail of the villains who have turned New Orleans into a testing ground for the drug.

The film’s narrative is “so dense, it becomes tangled in its own revelations”, said Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent. And though it raises some interesting questions – about the nature of power itself, for instance, and about the risks one might take for greatness, they’re all left hanging. To make matters worse, the film’s visuals are a mess: action sequences are confusing, and the “sickly” lighting fails to evoke any real atmosphere. The film is admittedly rather lacking in substance, said Ben Travis in Empire, but it’s glossy and enjoyable, and anchored by a fine performance from Dominique Fishback. Playing a teenager and aspiring rapper who has started dealing the drug in order to provide for her family and support her diabetic mother, she “lights up the screen”. Available on Netflix.