The Netflix action movie Project Power starts with an intriguing hook that it never effectively exploits: In New Orleans, a new street drug (codenamed "power") gives anyone who takes it superpowers for five minutes at a time. Those powers are completely unpredictable (and for some, they merely lead to death), but they offer average people the chance to briefly become superhuman, creating the possibility of a city overrun with rogue superpowered citizens. That’s not really what the movie is about, though, and while there are a number of scenes of characters powering up, the effects of the drug are mostly underwhelming, providing people with basic enhancements rather than wild abilities.

One sequence early in the movie points to the creative possibilities of the premise, as New Orleans cop Frank (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) chases a bank robber with chameleon-like powers, who blends into his surroundings as he flees from the authorities. That kind of citywide chaos resulting from rampant superpowers could have made for a fun, fast-paced action movie, but Project Power instead turns into a dour crime drama in which the drug that everyone is seeking could just as well be an existing narcotic. The larger conspiracy elements that take over the plot in the third act never come together, and there’s no one who could qualify as a superhero or a supervillain.

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Frank forms a connection with street-level dealer Robin (Dominique Fishback) in his efforts to track the manufacture and distribution of the drug, but he’s also a user, taking pills to give himself invulnerability when he’s chasing down criminals like the chameleonic bank robber. Frank is an upstanding guy but he’s not a larger-than-life hero, and he’s mainly focused on keeping the streets safe. His counterpart is former military officer Art (Jamie Foxx), who’s introduced as a shadowy figure known only as the Major (the closest the movie gets to a superhero codename), a former part of the government program that initially developed the drug.

Art’s ambitions are higher than Frank’s, aimed at taking down the well-funded operation that supplies street dealers and users, but his main motivation is simply to rescue his daughter from the government’s clutches. The ill-defined government agency developing the formula for superpowers includes a handful of menacing men in black and a leader played by Amy Landecker who barks orders and talks in non-specific terms about changing the world. It’s not entirely clear how the agency is tied to the international cabal led by a dealer known as Biggie (Rodrigo Santoro), who is attempting to expand the drug’s distribution around the world. Art, Frank and Robin fight against both organizations, but the murky plotting makes it hard to understand their larger goals.

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Long stretches of the movie pass by without anyone using any powers at all, and a mid-film presentation by Biggie explains that the powers are all derived from abilities manifested in the animal kingdom, which grounds them in pseudo-science but limits the filmmakers’ opportunities to depict wild and strange new abilities. Strength and invulnerability seem to be the most common, and the only impressive demonstration of superpowers comes when Biggie himself transforms into a Hulk-like giant. As a result, there’s little excitement generated when a character pops one of the glowing pills.

That just leaves the muddled crime story and the lives of the main characters to hold the audience’s interest, and while the three stars all have charismatic screen presences, Frank, Art and Robin are hastily drawn and not particularly compelling. Teenage Robin, who deals the drug as a means to fund a better life for herself and dreams of becoming a rapper, is the most entertaining to watch. She has a sense of humor that contrasts to the grim, determined Art and Frank. There are some corny lessons from Art about her discovering her true "power," which is self-expression, but the screenplay by Mattson Tomlin doesn’t carry any unifying message. While the movie is set in New Orleans, and Frank talks about the importance of protecting "his" city, a cheap Hurricane Katrina reference is as far as the movie goes toward social commentary.

Directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman got their start with documentary hit Catfish, but they’ve since gone on to helm several mid-level genre efforts, including a couple Paranormal Activity sequels and the 2016 social-media thriller Nerve, which similarly squandered a promising premise about an app that rewarded people for committing crimes. They bring some energy to Project Power's occasional action sequences, and it looks more cinematic than some of Netflix’s bigger-budget action movies. However, all the spectacle has been drained away by the drawn-out finale, which takes place almost entirely in cramped corridors on a ship run by the evil government agency.

After making an impressive return to movies after some time away with Amazon’s one-man showcase 7500, Gordon-Levitt is too often sidelined here, playing a straight-arrow cop without much depth. Foxx gets the showier role, delving into some of Art’s trauma over losing his daughter, but even he sometimes seems overwhelmed by the convoluted plot. "I thought we were like Batman and Robin," Robin (dressed in clothes with colors that recall her namesake’s costume) laments to Frank at one point, and that line encapsulates Project Power’s missed opportunity. There’s nothing super going on here at all.

Starring Jamie Foxx, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Dominique Fishback, Rodrigo Santoro, Courtney B. Vance and Amy Landecker, Project Power premieres Friday, August 14 on Netflix.

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