What are you willing to risk for five minutes of extraordinary powers?
In the streets of New Orleans, rumors begin to circulate about a mysterious pill that unleashes different superpowers for each person. The problem ? Impossible to know what will happen before swallowing it. If some are seen armed with bulletproof skin, become invisible, or are given superhuman strength, others experience a lethal reaction. But when the pill dangerously blows up crime in town, a cop teams up with a young drug dealer and former soldier motivated by a secret revenge to fight power with power, hoping the Pill will allow them to hunt down and stop. those who invented it.
The big Netflix productions follow each other and are not alike. After the entertaining and likeable action films “The Old Guard” last month and “Tyler Rake” in the spring, here comes “Project Power”. And it’s much less satisfying here. As a scenario, we are offered a promising cocktail between “Limitless” (for the magic pill), the “X-Men” saga (for superpowers) and “Bright” from the same platform for the association of characters. Except that this promising alloy does not keep its promises and never capitalizes on its premise, however rather intriguing and open to many possibilities. We are just entitled to a banal chase between bad guys and good guys, the latter meeting way too late in the film. The beginning is difficult to get started but then we get captivated, at least for a while, for this story of the pill which increases tenfold powers from the animal genre in those who take it (idea little exploited). But it is clear that all of this does not lead to much very exciting, “Project Power” contenting itself with a limp series of action scenes ranging from successful (the one in public housing with the teenager on fire), to failure (the final bouquet of an absolute banal) through the frustrating (this scene of a fight in the evening in the cellar where nothing can be seen since filmed from the point of view of a locked woman). In addition, the narrative logic of the spatial evolution of the characters and their investigation is not very clear and the villains again at Netlix very little charismatic. The staging is as eye-catching as possible, appearing satisfactory today but most certainly out of date in a few years, the duo of filmmakers stringing together fashionable technological prowess and garish colors. We are also a little fed up, in the name of diversity, to see female and African-American characters put there just to say about (as in “The Old Gaurd”). The will is commendable, the execution now appears to be a sad obligatory step. We’re happy to find the all too rare Joseph Gordon-Levitt but he has little to play like all the other protagonists reduced to basic labels. This is the kind of film that relaxes on a Saturday night if you are not demanding or not demanding, but it is far from the blockbusters that this film wants to match. So even if the special effects are convincing and some rather nice manifestations of power, we have already seen that better in mutants. Dispensable therefore and above all very little surprising. More cinema reviews on my Ciné Ma Passion Facebook page.