Project Power (2020)

Project Power arrives from Netflix with the quiet confidence of a film that knows exactly what it is: an $85 million action thriller about a pill that grants five minutes of superpowers, set in a New Orleans still carrying the bruises of Hurricane Katrina. Jamie Foxx plays Art, a former Delta Force operator hunting the source of the drug. Dominique Fishback plays Robin, a teenage dealer who wants to be a rapper. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays the cop caught between them. The trio collides, as trios do, and the result is slick, competent, and largely uninterested in its own ideas.

Those ideas are present, if undernourished. The villain is Teleios, a private defense contractor running mass drug trials on a poor, predominantly Black population, and the film lets that arrangement sit there without much comment. The exploitation reads clearly enough: a corporation treats a city as a laboratory and its residents as inventory. Robin carries herself with real agency, and Fishback gives the character a weight the script does not always earn. The casting places Black performers at the center of a mainstream genre picture without making a ceremony of it, which is its own kind of progress and its own kind of restraint.

Elsewhere the film is content to be an action movie. There is no queer presence, no environmental anxiety, no meditation on bodies or brains, no revisionist tinkering with the historical record. The moral questions about addiction, institutional rot, and who profits from human suffering are raised and then politely set aside in favor of another explosion. The sermonizing is minimal, which will disappoint some and relieve others. As a specimen of contemporary social consciousness, it registers as a mild case: aware of its setting, faintly guilty about it, and ultimately more interested in the pistol-shrimp punchline.