Project Power
Short description
Project Power is set in New Orleans, where a new drug has appeared on the streets: a pill that gives whoever takes it a superpower, though which one is impossible to predict until it kicks in. The effects vary widely and do not always favor the user, and the pill's arrival drives crime in the city to dangerous levels. A local police officer, a teenage dealer and a former soldier, whose motives are personal, join forces to track down the people manufacturing and distributing the drug, a hunt that requires them to take the pill themselves.
Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman directed the film, working from a screenplay by Mattson Tomlin. It is the fifth feature in the directing pair's filmography, following Paranormal Activity 3, Paranormal Activity 4, Nerve and Viral, and preceding Secret Headquarters and the documentary Who Is Sabato De Sarno? A Gucci Story. Jamie Foxx plays Art, Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Frank, and Dominique Fishback plays Robin, with Rodrigo Santoro, Courtney B. Vance and Amy Landecker among the supporting cast.
Released in August 2020, the film runs 113 minutes. Its audience scores sit close to each other, at 6 out of 10 on IMDb across roughly 103,000 votes and 6.4 out of 10 on TMDB from a much smaller pool of about 3,100 votes. The critics' rating of 5.6 out of 10, drawn from 184 reviews, is slightly below both audience figures, a narrow gap rather than a sharp divide between reviewers and viewers.
What's left behind the scenes
- In one of the scenes, a line spoken by Gardner, played by Amy Landecker, references the case of Henrietta Lacks. This African American woman, who died of cancer without knowing it herself, became a donor of biological material during treatment in 1951. Her story is told in George C. Wolfe's television drama "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" (2017), which features Kayan Simone in one of the roles (where she played Tracey).
- The film's directors, Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, had planned from the beginning to cast Jamie Foxx in the lead role.
- When Frank, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, says, “You know what happened last time New Orleans trusted guys in suits,” it’s a reference to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and how poorly the U.S. government handled its devastating consequences.
- Art, played by Jamie Foxx, drives a blue pickup truck with “Supermarch Pool Cleaners” written on the door. Supermarch was a company involved in the film's production.
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