You liked David Ayer’s “Bright”? Well, Netflix’s “Project Power” might just be the street-based superhero flick for you. This anti-drug parable deals with an American government intent on medically experimenting on -shock- black people. Jamie Foxx stars as Art, an ex-soldier subjugated to government experimentation when he was in the army. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Frank, a police detective hooked on the experimental drug, a glowing capsule that gives anyone who takes it superpowers, but only for five minutes. The catch is, you don’t really know what particular superpower you’ll inherit until you take the pill. Oh, and there’s the odd risk that you can die from taking the drug by, quite literally, blowing up. Yeah, it’s just that kind of movie. Frank and Art eventually end up teaming together to rescue the latter’s daughter Tracy (Kyanna Simone Simpson) who’s holed up in a top-secret facility on the Mississippi River, where super evil doctors are experimenting on her. The amount of misguided hip-hop musical cues here is large and wide, ditto the forced superhero references to the likes of “X-Men” and “Captain America.” The plot is loose and confusing but fizzles out quickly. And, by the way, whose idea was it to set the movie in the beautiful city of New Orleans only to have the movie take place mostly at night? Directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, they directed the documentary “Catfish” back in 2010, deliver a few moments of visual magic here and there, but they try to jam in too many ideas to make a coherent whole out of their movie. They could have easily focused on the rural milieu of the story, but rather go for the mind-numbing action instead. The result is nothing short of a muddled mess. [C]
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In case you’re too curious to wait, here’s the leaked teaser for Jeremy Saulnier’s “Slayground” that’s currently being shown in theaters, and it plays hard.