There isn’t much to spoil about this movie so I’m mostly going to just go through it as it is. But if you’re worried about the movie being spoiled, just know it’s pretty much the same as most movies like this, of this genre. You can probably guess how it ends. Let’s do it!

Power Ballad(2026) stars Paul Rudd, Nick Jonas, Jack Reynor, Marcella Plunkett, Beth Fallon, Peter McDonald, Havana Rose Liu, Keith McErlean, Paul Reid, and Rory Keenan. It was written by John Carney and Peter McDonald and directed by John Carney.

The Synopsis
IMDb says “Rick, a washed-up wedding singer, and Danny, a fading boy band star, bond over music and a late-night jam session. When Danny turns Rick’s song into a hit, Rick sets out to reclaim the recognition he believes he deserves.”

Background
John Carney is an Irish director who has exclusively made movies about music and musicians. A lot of them tend to have Irish people in them as well, or be about Ireland generally. This is the first one of them I’ve seen. I’ve been meaning to watch the others. I just haven’t gotten to any of them yet.

Plot Rundown (Spoilers Here)
So I’m just going to do the whole thing now. Like IMDb said, the general synopsis happens. We open on a bunch of middle-aged dorks playing different weddings. They’re a wedding band that exclusively play old songs from the 80’s and 90’s, whatever gets requested really. Their front man singer is Mr. Paul Rudd, playing a character named Rick Power. Fucking incredible name. I don’t know if you picked up on it, but the movie is called Power Ballad, because this is the story of Rick Power’s ballad.

The band plays an overnight gig at a mansion for some rich people who happen to be friends with an ex-boy band member named Danny Wilson, and they insist he get up on stage with the wedding band and sing a song. I think they do a Stevie Wonder song or something, and Paul gets, I feel, disproportionally psyched about playing with Nick Jonas. I don’t buy into the joy of the scene. They all do a good job, but their voices have been tinkered with or something so it sounds like their natural singing voices have been futzed with. Paul’s especially. And he’s a good singer.

Rick Power runs into Danny later that night after the set and they get stoned and drunk. Paul helps Nick work on his shit songs and plays a bit of a song he’s been working on for years, which is what Nick eventually steals. They share their both wildly different worldviews and respective naiveties about their current stations in life and what they should or shouldn’t be. Both of these men are living great fulfilling lives on paper for different reasons but seek validation creatively.

Paul goes home with the band and drives his daughter to school. Before he leaves, Nick Jonas gifts him an old guitar. He keeps calling Nick Jonas a kid, which I guess makes sense, because he is twenty years younger than him, though in the movie they make him a few years younger still. But I think because Paul Rudd doesn’t really look 57 and I thought Nick Jonas was in his 40’s, it doesn’t really feel right.

From there everything progresses pretty quickly. We get a lot of parallel shots. I was watching the movie thinking “What is this now? Am I watching Fast and Furious Presents: Hobbes and Shaw?” Great joke, John. When Paul Rudd gets home it’s pouring down rain and he has to take the trash out to the curb, but when Nick Jonas gets home he’s in sunny Malibu or whatever and he has a gardener and a take out the trash man. But of course Paul Rudd has a wonderful wife and daughter and Nick Jonas only has lots of money and a beautiful girlfriend.

But not for long you see, because Nick Jonas’s girlfriend clearly thinks his songs are shit and his manager says if he doesn’t get a hit soon, he’s gonna have to sell the McMansion. Oh no!!! So one day while he’s noodling away on the piano, he plays Paul Rudd’s song, which is called “How To Write A Song”. We’re also led to assume, fairly I think, that the song was written for Paul’s wife. Anyway, Nick plays the song and his girlfriend thinks the song is A) Written by him, and B) About her. He tells her as such. She tells him to release it.

And five or six months later, Paul hears a song at the mall. And it’s his song! And he goes insane! From here there’s not much to talk about, he just swears he wrote the song but has no way to prove it, so everyone in town thinks he’s crazy, but it feels like they cut down the scenes exploring his character and giving him extra time. It feels like they cut down some of the scenes with his family. There should be more of those. Paul’s wife in this is played by Marcella Plunkett, who is John Carney’s wife in real life. The at-home dynamic is lovely.

Paul Rudd calls Nick’s manager’s office incessantly, and is eventually told to fuck off. Nick Jonas seems a bit conflicted but not much. He breaks up with his girlfriend offscreen. The song is instantly a massive hit. Everybody loves it. No song has ever been bigger than this song. Paul has to hear it everywhere. It gets requested at a wedding, and Paul absolutely does not want to sing it, but his boss wants him to play it because he already kinda doesn’t like him because he sometimes sings songs off his own albums at weddings. Paul’s former band was called Octagon, by the way. Cool.

Anyway he fights his boss at a wedding while drunk and his best friend tries to back him up but he’s rude to his friend for no reason really because they haven’t had enough scenes one on one to build any tension or justify this. And then after his wife or daughter’s birthday dinner, his daughter insists on turning up the volume on the song when it comes on the radio to piss off her dad. He goes to turn it off, stops paying attention, veers into the wrong lane and tips the van on its side. His daughter breaks her arm. His wife assumes he was drunk. Which is intense.

He leaves and makes up with his bestie, again too quickly, and then insists they have to go to Malibu or LA or whatever and go confront Nick Jonas. They crash his after-concert party with the help of Nick’s friends that they played the wedding for. Sandy, Paul’s bestie, drinks a bunch and chooses to play a cool old guitar instead of having sex with a woman. And then Paul Rudd confronts Nick Jonas and accidentally sort of throws him off the side of a building.

There’s a very short scrabble and argument and Nick is basically like “I don’t know what you want from me” and Paul is like “Honestly I don’t either now but bro you made me go insane and I even wondered if it was really my song but then I remembered that you think it’s a love song and actually I wrote that for my daughter when I looked at her and realized I couldn’t abandon her my wife and keep touring with my moderately successful band so I stayed in Dublin and I’m gonna go back home and keep being a sexy family man and what will you have, Nick Jonas?!”

So then Paul and Sandy run away and go home to Dublin and Paul gets his job and his family back and finds happiness playing wedding bands and realizes he only cares that he’s playing music for a couple people who really enjoy it and he doesn’t care if it’s his. And Nick Jonas almost reveals to thousands of people that he stole the only song he has that they care about but chooses not to and I don’t really know where that leaves him? Meanwhile Paul’s daughter finds an old home movie of her dad singing the song to her and the last shot of the movie is Paul giving a bunch of money to a homeless musician and smiling.

The message is family matters and credit doesn’t but he still gets the credit. Weird ending. Maybe he abandons his family after all. “I’ve got my residuals now! Fuck you, Irish family! I’m going back to Kansas City, canonical hometown of both Rick Power and Paul Rudd! Peace!”

General Thoughts
I mean, it’s fine. This is right down the middle stuff. I think the issue here is I read a bunch of reviews in anticipation of release and they all say basically the same thing but they either do or don’t like the movie. I can’t really say much different than my much more esteemed not really colleagues because they’re all more prolific than me. And paid, presumably. Does someone want to pay me for this?

Anyway. The somewhat cruel thing that could be said of this movie is that, like the song in the film, this reads like an idea John Carney had years ago and didn’t know what else to do with it but he’s mostly released it as is. It’s all pretty surface level. I don’t know that Nick Jonas was the right choice for this, even if he is an ex-boy band member in real life. I think the main mistake made here is that John Carney doesn’t really take a stand.

Nick Jonas sucks in this, as in his character is a dick, but vaguely and in a sad, slightly redeemable way. I think this movie would be better if the characters were pushed further. Nick needs to be meaner. The fight at the end has to go further. Like that movie Splitsville that I haven’t seen. The best bit in the movie is when Paul sits in Nick Jonas’s hot tub and confronts him and has massive manic energy. It looks like he’s nearly about to snap. But it feels like his road there is slightly forced and we don’t see quite enough of it to work.

I should say, it is a largely enjoyable and quite pleasant movie. It’s meant to be crowd pleasing and sincere. I said what I said, but just because I think this should be Paul Rudd going full Friendship on Nick Jonas doesn’t mean I’m right. I can also tell there’s some nice small town Irishisms from Carney put in here. All the band members and townspeople and neighbors are oddbods and weirdos.

And there are other nice touches thrown in, like during the montage of articles and interviews about Nick Jonas’s career resurgence, we learn via article that he split with his girlfriend and the headline says “We felt we needed to focus on our careers” or something like that. Some spot on copy-paste Hollywood couple break-up press release jargon. Which again is why I’m more inclined toward a version of this where Jonas is a straight up unlikable villain. He can be conflicted and kind of a nice guy sometimes and still suck. He doesn’t get it. He cares more about the fame and being single to date models in his hot tub. He doesn’t want fully clothed 57 year olds getting in his hot tub to talk vendettas. I also like that Nick doesn’t understand why it’s a hit song.

I’m loving the dad rock fits Rudd is rocking in this, by the way. There’s some classic “This guy hasn’t moved on” vibes going on. He’s got good hair. There’s also a lot of slo-mo shots of Paul and his wedding band or Paul and his bestie doing cool slow walks, and they’re usually meant to be funny, but there’s so many that it starts to feel like it’s not meant to be ironic anymore. It feels like John Carney wants you to think this is super cool.

I did think to myself during this that I wish Paul could have a slam dunk movie with an excellent performance that I could just gush about. I’m nitpicky. Maybe it is just a situation where Paul’s prime era as a Hollywood guy is gone. He’s still good, but the kind of movie that properly utilized his skills as a leading man doesn’t really exist anymore. I like him in Death of a Unicorn and Friendship, but he does feel a bit out of place sometimes.

Though I should say, I was… what’s the opposite of reminiscing? I was remembering some of the shit I’ve had to watch for this blog, and I’d like to say, if Paul Rudd or a friend or family member of Paul Rudd reads this, I really don’t ever want to watch another shit Ghostbusters sequel or Anaconda remake. Keep experimenting, man. Broaden your horizons.

Yeah.

Some Stuff John Wrote Down During The Movie

• Oh hey it’s Paul Rudd
• Wedding attendees don’t want to hear your original songs, Paul
• It does feel like he’s lip synching his own singing
• So many leather jackets
• I like how horny him and his Irish wife are
• But not in a creepy way
• It’s just endearing
• Do I want to live in Dublin?
• “Are we stoned? Or just old?”
• I’m loving Paul’s dad rock vibe
• PAUL RUDD’S CHARACTER’S NAME IS RICK POWER
• “No no no, we’re one of those strictly drug free wedding bands”
• I love Rick Power
• “You’d be shocked how hard it is to get people to take you seriously”
• Sayeth the 27 year old to the 57 year old
• “Play the songs you want to play, Danny”
• That’s tricky
• Because now Danny is going to want to play your song, Rick Power
• Who even wants to be a famous musician
• When you’ve got pot and a great Irish family
• Not me obviously, I’m sober and I live in a small apartment in DC with my good friend
• Which is also a nice life
• I don’t like Nick Jonas’s buzzed head look
• He needs longer hair
• His agent is manspreading so much it took up the whole span of the screen
• Rick Power’s daughter is clearly so fucking sick of hearing the songs he writes
• Lots of parallel scenes in this movie
• Why do I need to have sympathy for Nick Jonas, he’s rich and creatively unfulfilled and all he’ll lose is relevancy and his mansion
• I like that they’re both struggling because the kinds of music they made don’t hit with anyone anymore
• There’s no audience to play to
• I love all the flannels Paul is wearing
• Stop obsessing and go be with your wife bro
• Oh man, nobody believes Paul
• I hate Nick’s music video suit
• Tacky
• Fuck you, Nick Jonas
• Oh great the music video is exactly as tacky and terrible as the suit
• And he’s on Jimmy Fallon
• Even worse
• Oh shit he told his girlfriend the song was about him and now they’ve broken up but we’re supposed to give a shit about him?
• Oooh Paul don’t say you gave up your dreams to stay with your wife and daughter
• Very literal metaphor watching kids steal money from a homeless man’s guitar case and the homeless man not running after them and saying it’s okay
• Of course Paul’s Irish best friend wears a kimono
• I think I love Paul Rudd because he’s an inspiration to men with big foreheads
• It’s funny that the Irish director got his longtime Irish collaborator to play an American dude bro agent
• I mean maybe instead of going to America on a revenge mission you should be home in Ireland because it’s more worrying that your wife assumed you were drunk driving when you got them all in an accident
• I like that Sandy’s impression of Danny sounds more like Christopher Walken
• Oh dude don’t follow Nick Jonas, those women are about to sex him
• Don’t get in the hot tub fully clothed
• I want more unhinged Paul Rudd though, let’s lean into this
• To be fair to Nick Jonas, I would be scared right now if I were him
• “You seemed real.” “I am real.” “No. You’re just out of context.”
• That’s good dialogue
• Is there that much money in wedding bands?

Overall Rating: 7.2/10(It’s not bad! I wish there was more of an edge. I wish the themes were delved into a bit. Feels like it was sanded down a bit. But overall, a perfectly fine movie.)
Rudd Rating: 8.1/10(If I didn’t make it clear, Paul Rudd plays a man named RICK POWER. BEST FUCKING MOVIE EVER FUCKING MADE. HELL YEAH.)

Next time on Too Many Servings of John… I’m not making any specific promises because I am now employed, but I would expect some final Flying Nun recaps coming soon possibly. And some more silly stuff. And more Ruddtrospectives, because I have to get through some extra old crap, you know? Sausage Party is an absolute albatross around my neck. Sigh. Anyway, see you next time! Thanks for reading!