There’s a very witty performance at the center of “Power Book IV: Force,” the fourth and latest incarnation of the “Power” franchise on Starz starring Joseph Sikora as Tommy Egan, a bad boy extraordinaire pushing his way into Chicago’s illegal drug trade. Here’s a guy with attitude and swagger and a working-class suspicion of anything (or anyone) too slick. He’s rough around the edges, and proudly so. And he’s funny.
Tommy is forever in search of mess. Oh, does Tommy like mess! If there’s drama, he’ll find it. Or cause it: “I gotta short fuse and a long memory.” He has zero chill, but like every gangster from Scarface on down, he can size up a situation and is loyal in his own way, but at the end of the day he wants all the smoke. This controlled recklessness has served him well. Is he superhuman? No. He’s smart. And lucky.
Ghost, the main character in the original “Power,” was the closest thing he had to a brother, and now that’s gone, for good or for ill. Tommy is the kind of guy you want to follow into battle, except he’s choosing all the wrong battles. Unlike so many white people, he is at ease in Black spaces, among Black people. He’s blazingly confident, but to mangle an idiom: Confident’s just another word for nothing left to lose. In the real world, this kind of thing would have put someone like Tommy in the ground years ago. But here he is, living and breathing and driving that gorgeous deep blue Mustang around the city like he owns the place.
