Because of movie theaters being closed for the large majority of 2020, the movie landscape for this year has been…weird, to say the least. One of the weirdest things for me personally is how long it’s been since I’ve actually seen a new superhero movie. That’s probably why Project Power caught my interest when I heard about it, because I was itching for some new superhero content, and the concept behind this movie sounded fresh and exciting.

The basic concept in Project Power is that there is a new drug that has hit the streets, and it allows the person taking it to temporarily gain superpowers for five minutes. If your interests align with mine at all, this already sounds really interesting, but I know I had a lot of questions, so I want to clarify this premise a bit. The drug seems to tap into some sort of evolutionary abilities stored in our genes, similar to how animals have adapted different abilities over time. Apparently, everyone has their own ability that will come out when taking the drug, and the only way to know what it is is to try it. The problem with this is that some people that take it will have an ability like self-destructing, and so there’s a chance you’ll die if you try it out. However, once you do take it, you’ll have that ability for five minutes, and you’ll keep having that same ability every subsequent time you take the pill.

I had a thought early on during this movie that basically sums up my entire feelings toward Project Power. I thought to myself…”man, I would love to see this concept done in a better movie.” This was the same problem I had with the first movie in The Purge series, where I felt like it had such an original concept, full of so many different possibilities, but instead opted to tell one of the most generic stories possible with it.

We’re taken into the world of three different characters: an ex-soldier whose daughter has been kidnapped by the people supplying the drug, so he’s on a mission to find his way to the man in charge and get his daughter back; a cop who is trying to stop the spread of the drug in New Orleans; and a teenage girl who is selling the drug on the streets in order to pay for a surgery for her sick mother.

The unfortunate thing about Project Power is that I liked a lot of things about the movie on its individual merits, but it’s the sum of its parts that ends up falling flat. I think the movie has interesting characters, good acting, well-done special effects, and obviously an extremely intriguing concept. The problems rest almost entirely with the writing. The most frustrating thing about the story is just that it has storylines and relationships that ultimately go nowhere and mean nothing, and there’s just a lot of unexplored potential. I think that if Project Power took the same concept and told a different story with it, it could have been exceptional.

In the end, Project Power is one of the most frustrating kinds of movies to watch, because it’s fine, but it could have been great. I was so behind the basic premise for this movie, and I was really curious to see what they were going to do with it, but in the end I just felt disappointed. The frustrating thing is that the movie has a lot going for it even outside of its concept, and so it’s really not a bad movie by any means. I just see the potential in it to have been so much more than it is, and so that makes it hard to recommend.

3/5