What would you do with superpowers? It’s a tantalizing but one-dimensional question, a staple of small talk and ice-breakers everywhere. Stripped of any buzz-killing science, to think about what you’d do with invisibility, flight, or super-strength is usually to envision simple fixes to mundane annoyances. Eliminating your commute, escaping an awkward social situation; few people would choose the life of a crime-fighting vigilante.

Despite the personal flaws (and alleged crimes) of its creators, the sleeper hit Chronicle was one of the better studies of this idea, filtering the acquisition of superpowers through teenage angst and social isolation. But combining a sketchily-defined idea like random superpowers with social commentary is a volatile mix - you might get something new and revelatory, or you might get a fizzling “So what?” like Netflix’s new actioner, Project Power.

Written by Mattson Tomlin and directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, Project Power doesn’t show us superpowers conferred by spider bite, alien heritage, or a swim with electric eels. Instead, in this world, mysterious scientists have found a way to hack animal DNA to be delivered in glowing, hi-tech pills, which seem like a ham-fisted way to comment on both the opioid epidemic and our addiction to smartphones. Pop one, and you get five minutes of some power, which is apparently unique to the person. Some get Johnny Storm-like flames, others get bulletproof skin. Somehow, the filmmakers missed their chance at a joke scene where some druggie finds his only power is secreting hagfish slime.

These pills are only in the research phase, and we pick up the story as the shadowy Telios corporation is flooding the streets of New Orleans with the product to beta-test it. Looking to make a quick buck to pay for her mother’s medical expenses, Robin (Dominique Fishback) starts dealing the pills, though doesn’t try them herself. On the side, she acts as an informer for an NOPD detective (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), and crosses paths with a former soldier named Art (Jamie Foxx) who has some past connection to the development of the drug. It’s up to Robin to stay alive as the various factions fight to either help or hinder “the next phase of human evolution”.

The movie’s issues stem from the core premise: it’s all well and good to present superpowers as illegal drugs, but we have to understand the impact of the drugs on the people who use them. The guy with flame abilities (Machine Gun Kelly) seems to have massive burns on his body, but does the pill give him a high? How many things or enemies does he need to set alight before the disfigurement is worth it? The bank robber who can turn invisible can advance his career, with the only disadvantage being that people might see him naked when the five minutes are up. Then there’s the people who literally just explode when they take the pill, the result of some murky biological flaw. Given the huge range of results, it gets harder to believe that anyone would actually take the stuff. The extent of the movie’s commentary about drug epidemics is “they exist.”

The story operates on a basic timer: every 10 or 15 minutes, some new power will be shown, and then never returned to. If some main character hasn’t shown off their power yet, it’s just a matter of time before they do. In one muddled scene near the climax, Foxx’s character Art seems to joke that his power is that of the explosive hunting technique used by the pistol shrimp. Art’s description alone is somehow enough to scare a hired goon into letting him go. A smarter movie might have used this for comic relief; instead, it’s revealed that Art indeed has pistol shrimp powers, albeit ones that seem about as scientifically accurate as the Dilophosaurus from Jurassic Park.

The filmmakers make some half-hearted stabs at establishing some engaging relationships between Robin, Art, and Gordon-Levitt’s Frank, but it doesn’t add up to much. Robin is a streetwise kid who raps (yup), Art is a PTSD-afflicted vet on a mission, and Frank is loose-cannon cop whose captain literally asks for his gun and badge. I hear the writer saying, “He jokes about Clint Eastwood, so it’s self-referential!” I don’t know where the Screenwriting Trope Warehouse is in L.A., but it’s got to be a place that Tomlin has visited.

Like so many Netflix Originals, nothing in Project Power is offensively bad, just bland. The experience of watching it is the exact kind of mundanity that superpowers were designed to distract us from. As we’ve found with all sorts of industries during this pandemic, sometimes it’s better to wait for the good stuff.

Project Power gets two stars out of four.

Stray Thoughts

• The villains here are comically boring, and we don’t even see which power Amy Landecker’s main boss has.

• The Hulk ripoff that Rodrigo Santoro transforms into feels like the product of some VFX studio forced into crunch mode.

• The only interesting visuals in the whole film are the ink-drop time-lapse sequences to depict the drug hitting the users’ bloodstreams.