In 2007, Irish director John Carney kicked off his career with Once, a wonderful film about a guy and a girl playing music together in Dublin, which featured the Oscar-winning song “Falling Slowly” and went on to spawn a popular Broadway musical. Ever since, Carney has made a series of other movies that centered on music, like Begin Again, Sing Street and Flora and Son. And none of them have been anywhere close to as good as Once, nor have any produced an original song anywhere close to the level of “Falling Slowly.”
That’s also the case with Carney’s latest film, Power Ballad, which offers more star power than the director’s previous work. While it has a promising premise, it can’t deliver, for a few key reasons. Paul Rudd stars as Rick Power, who was once a rising American rock star but got a woman pregnant in Dublin, married her, and therefore had to give up his rock star dreams in favor of family life. Instead, he lives in Ireland and plays in a wedding band.
At one of those weddings, Rick meets Danny Wilson, a former teen boy band star (played by real-life former teen boy band star Nick Jonas) who’s trying to reinvent himself as a singer/songwriter type. They duet on a wedding song before getting into a late-night jam session, during which Rick plays Danny a song he wrote. Months later, Danny has recorded Rick’s song and turned it into a massive hit, with the help of his girlfriend (the very appealing actress Havana Rose Liu, who serves her plot function and then disappears from the movie).
It’s something that might occasion one of those lawsuits that regularly gets filed over the authorship of a hit song. Rick, however, can’t provide any solid proof that he actually wrote the song. This puts Rick in an angry, depressive state, as all his resentments bubble up.
Power Ballad never finds the right tone for Rudd’s performance, it can’t decide on the stakes, and the song at the movie’s center sucks. The performance is a different one from Rudd, although one of his best performances, in Role Models, had him playing it depressingly miserable. But it never succeeds at being funny, or poignant. A late visit to Los Angeles fails to succeed at comedy or deliver any dramatic payoff. (Jonas, meanwhile, is barely given a character to play at all.)
Are we rooting for Rick to make peace with never becoming a rock star, and be happy with the life and family he has? Or should we be hoping he proves his intellectual property claim?
Then, there’s the song. It’s got that That Thing You Do! Thing, where the film establishes that the song in it is a hit, and it’s going to be played repeatedly throughout the film. If a film’s going to do that, the song had better be good, and this one isn’t.
Also, the movie is called Power Ballad, and the song isn’t. Not that that’s a real genre—kind of like “Yacht Rock,” “power ballads” was invented years after the fact, in reference to rock ballads by 1980s metal bands—but the song in the movie sounds nothing like any of them. And Rick’s last name being “Power” isn’t enough to justify that.