In Review: 'The Adam Project'

With their abysmal follow-up to last year's hit 'Free Guy,' director Shawn Levy and star Ryan Reynolds make another "original" film that draws from blockbuster sources.

The two Adams, trading quips in the forest.

The Adam Project
Dir. Shawn Levy
106 min.

Back to the Future meets Star Wars meets Top Gun meets Guardians of the Galaxy meets The Last Starfighter meets Somewhere In Time—and that’s just for starters—in the abysmal Netflix movie The Adam Project, which is what happens when you wish on a cursed monkey’s paw that Hollywood would make more original movies. Last year, director Shawn Levy and his star, Ryan Reynolds, collaborated on Free Guy, the only Top 10-grossing movie of 2021 that wasn’t a sequel, reboot, franchise extension, or anything else drawn from pre-existing I.P., though the film itself proved the distinction to be dispiritingly thin. Levy works on the Netflix homage-a-thon Stranger Things. He serves microwaved leftovers and gets called a chef. 

The algorithmic mirthlessness of The Adam Project feels of a piece with another Reynolds/Netflix pageview-hoarder, Red Notice, in that there’s no evidence that anyone cares about the material. They’re just calculating what they think a general audience might like, based on past blockbuster hits and perhaps some rigorous focus-group testing. And it’s not like Reynolds is capable of disguising it, either: Not caring is his personal brand, the air of self-amused disaffection that he introduced in National Lampoon’s Van Wilder 20 years ago and has cultivated in nearly every film since. He quips away until called upon to show a little earnestness, and that’s when his limitations are exposed. There’s only so much that he can fake. 

As for Levy’s leftovers: The Back to the Future connection is strongest in The Adam Project, to the point where it’s referenced explicitly in the dialogue, but while Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale’s franchise famously sweats over the implications of time travel, this film smugly yadda-yaddas away all of its temporal paradoxes. In his standard everyman role, Reynolds stars as Adam, a normal guy in the extremely not-normal situation of piloting a space jet through a wormhole in 2050 and accidentally landing in 2022. Adam meets a 12-year-old version of himself, played by Walker Scobell, and it turns out that young Adam talks exactly like Ryan Reynolds. (“Did you order, like, a bully starter kit on Amazon?” he muses to his middle-school tormenter, before getting punched in the gut.) 

The butterfly effect doesn’t even begin to account for how a man interacting with his younger self might change the future, but again, such questions are nothing The Adam Project is interested in sorting out. (When young Adam asks old Adam if he remembers meeting himself, he all but gets a pat on his silly little head.) The basic gist is that time travel is a bad idea that Adam’s late father (Mark Ruffalo) had an important role in developing, so the two Adams must go back a little further in time to talk to their dad before their adversary, Maya (Catherine Keener), alters the futures irreversibly. There’s also some emotional business to handle, too, like the two Adams’ relationship with their grieving single mother (Jennifer Garner) and the older Adam’s marriage to Laura (Zoe Saldaña), which all these time-altering shenanigans might wipe away.

Time travel allows Adam to have a metaphysical conversation with himself, which yields little more than the narrow insight that he should have been kinder to his mother and understood his father better. The space-time continuum bends to accommodate the banal. The film lacks the imagination to even try playful references to the future, like the Ronald Reagan and Chuck Berry riffs in Back to the Future. When you’ve cast Mark Ruffalo in the Doc Brown role, you’ve given up trying to show the audience a good time.

As The Adam Project drearily goes through the sci-fi/action motions, it’s the supporting actors who prove most acutely painful to watch, because Hollywood seems incapable of offering roles worthy of them. Twenty years ago, Ruffalo looked like the next Brando in You Can Count On Me, and now he’s logging time in the MCU and trading punches with Ryan Reynolds. And the saltiness that Keener has brought to Nicole Holofcener films undergoes a branding here as Maya shouts incoherent invective from the cockpit of her space jet and interacts with a creepy digitally enhanced younger version of herself. They deserve better. So do we.

(Programming note: We were unable to see the next Pixar film Turning Red in time for the usual Thursday review, but Keith will have a review up tomorrow afternoon. Also, Substack introduced a new app yesterday, and we encourage you to check it out. It’s an elegantly designed newsletter reader for phones and tablets.)

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