Film Review - Power Ballad

Images courtesy of Madman Entertainment.

John Carney’s Power Ballad (2026) is a heartwarming yet unremarkable musical comedy that misses a lot of notes.

Power Ballad follows aging wedding-band singer Rick (Paul Rudd) who, after jamming with washed up boy band star Danny Wilson (Nick Jonas), learns that his original songs have been stolen to headline Wilson’s comeback tour. The film follows in the footsteps of Carney’s previous works like Once (2007) and Sing Street (2016), where music is used as a storytelling device, opting for a “sing don’t tell” style.

This is an interesting way to convey the plot and character development without exposition, but the technique is undermined by the fact that they play one singular song so many times throughout the film that it loses any potential capacity for engagement due to overexposure. While initially this is a cool way to immersively show the audience how fed up Rudd’s character is with how popular the song is, it quickly loses its charm.

Whenever a character steps up to a mic to sing a song, there is a very jarring shift in sound quality, with poor equalisation and audio-mixing breaking the audience’s suspension of disbelief, despite the fact that Paul Rudd did actually sing his characters songs for the film.

Power Ballad is visually uninspired, being shot completely with high quality deep focus lenses, resulting in every scene looking like it was filmed on an iPhone. Despite the film’s 90 minute run time, its pacing makes it feel significantly longer, with many scenes going so long it grinds any of the film’s momentum to a halt. It is, in essence, an hour and a half long SNL skit.

In spite of these shortcomings, the film is surprisingly entertaining, however most of the interest is derived from funny self-contained scenes instead of genuine intrigue generated by the film’s overarching story.

5 young Paul Rudds in a wig out of 10.

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Power Ballad is screening in cinemas from Thursday the 28th of May. For tickets and more info, click here.