On The Pill

Netflix movie Project Power takes a gritty approach to the superhero genre

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NO SUPERHEROES, ONLY SUPERPOWERS. That’s the mantra directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman adopted for their new Netflix feature Project Power. The crime thriller/action film’s premise involves a drug that grants its user extraordinary abilities – but only for five minutes. From that premise, Project Power could have spiralled into a metahuman free-for-all. Well, this isn’t that movie.

“That’s part of what attracted us to the project,” Joost tells Red Alert. “It doesn’t go in the direction I think you might assume it would based on the concept. We hadn’t really seen superpowers that had consequences and side effects the way they did in this script. The man who catches on fire gets horribly burned and disfigured by his power. The guy who grows to be 15-feet tall has stretch marks. It could even kill you if you’re not careful about it.

“Screenwriter Mattson Tomlin created a grounded world, with characters that didn’t fit easily into boxes,” he continues. “We love genre films. We love comic books, and we love spectacle. But what we also love is characters and reality, and this felt like it had both of those things.”

Project Power follows New Orleans cop Frank (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), teenage drug dealer Robin (Dominique Fishback) and Art (Jamie Foxx), a father desperately searching for his missing daughter. When their worlds collide, the trio must put aside their differences to take down the manufacturer of the drug.