Vague Visages’ Power Ballad review contains minor spoilers. John Carney’s 2026 movie features Paul Rudd, Nick Jonas and Havana Rose Liu. Check out the VV home page for more film criticism, movie reviews and film essays.

John Carney is an easy filmmaker to criticize. Since breaking out internationally with his micro-budget indie Once (2006), his films have largely remained in the same comfort zone, rarely deviating from stories about the power of music bringing people together. The flop of Carney’s immediate Once follow-up, the zany comedy Zonad (2009), is likely another key reason he now seems reluctant to stray from a familiar formula. And then there’s the music itself, which is bland, uninspired balladry — except for the winning 80s pop pastiche of Sing Street (2016) — that never convinces as either profound artistry or an in-universe hit single. The writer/director’s music tastes are stuck in the era where Starbucks sold as many CDs of adult contemporary singer-songwriters as they did cups of coffee, and it makes it hard to buy into the idea that any of Carney’s songs would inspire people in the present day.

Power Ballad, Carney’s latest and quite possibly best effort, shares this same issue when it comes to convincing audiences that a bland ballad could become a global hit single. However, in a world where Alex Warren’s dreadfully boring “Ordinary” has spent a full year on the Billboard charts, it doesn’t require as much suspension of disbelief as usual. The in-movie hit is less important than the creative feud behind it, with Power Ballad charting the fallout when a middle-aged wedding singer’s demo is plagiarized by a washed-up boy band singer who turns the song into a career-resurrecting success while his creative influence slums it in a Dublin cover band. The songwriter is Rick Power, a role that plays to star Paul Rudd’s strengths better than any of the middling franchise fare he’s been saddled with since joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The American actor can effectively portray an affable, charismatic stage performer and a devoted but dorky family man without one aspect detracting from the other, and the character’s prolonged crash-out as a song he wrote becomes a hit without his credit provides Rudd with some of the strongest comedic material to work with in more than a decade.

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Rudd has always been an effective straight man to more eccentric scene partners, which Carney and co-writer Peter McDonald use to their advantage by keeping Rick’s meltdown as grounded as possible without minimizing the hilarity that comes from his frustration. Months after first meeting Danny Wilson (Nick Jonas) at a wedding and getting no returned calls after his song becomes an unlikely hit, the protagonist makes the decision to fly to Los Angeles with bandmate Sandy (McDonald) to track him down. For a screenwriter/actor, it could seem egotistical to create an integral sidekick role with most of the laugh lines in the later acts, but McDonald’s presence helps Rudd’s star shine brighter, ensuring he retains the affable everyman persona that made him a reliable leading man in the era of Judd Apatow comedy dominance. Rick’s crash out isn’t too melodramatic either, with Rudd convincingly selling the emotional fallout of the protagonist’s situation as he struggles to be seen as anything other than a joke by family and friends.

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Jonas is less revelatory in Power Ballad, although his performance is solid enough to dissuade any accusations of stunt casting. He works best when opposite Rudd in the early stretches, with a boozy and all-night jam session revealing the pair might have the best chemistry of any combination of actors. It’s almost a shame that the plot forces one to take advantage of the other, as Jonas is never more relaxed as a performer than he is in Power Ballad. To give the performance some backhanded credit, the character arc is built upon maintaining a very public lie, as Danny shows a relative lack of ease when performing with other cast members, despite Jonas being a stadium-touring artist in his own right. This can be explained away by a lingering anxiety that each gig could his his last.

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Carney and McDonald’s screenplay makes it easy to root for Rick, despite a frustrating amount of carelessness, because they make it explicit that he’s not interested in the money that would come from songwriting royalties — he just wants recorded proof that he’s written something that has finally connected with people. And it’s here where the hollowness of Danny’s hit “How to Write a Song (Without You)” feels almost weaponized, with the movie all but underlining that it doesn’t ring true as a hit single because it lacks the author’s intended meaning, thus becoming a vacuous love song in translation. Intentionally or not, Power Ballad is the most self-aware a Carney movie has been about how inauthentically rendered songs sound to a contemporary audience.

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Ultimately, Power Ballad is an authentic crowd pleaser that the movie’s in-universe hit single could never be. The recurring accusation remains true — if you’ve seen one John Carney film, you’ve seen them all. But if you do only see one, then make it this.

Alistair Ryder (@YesitsAlistair) is a film and TV critic based in Manchester, England. By day, he interviews the great and the good of the film world for Zavvi, and by night, he criticizes their work as a regular reviewer at outlets including The Film Stage and Looper. Thank you for reading film criticism, movie reviews and film reviews at Vague Visages.

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