Shawn Levy’s family-friendly sci-fi flick The Adam Project crams a lot into its 106-minute runtime. Its tale of a pilot, Adam (Ryan Reynolds), who travels from 2050 back to 2022 in order to meet up with his younger self (Walker Scobell) and prevent their father, Louis (Mark Ruffalo), from ever inventing time travel is more than enough story to fill a film.
Tack on more time jumping and the fact that both Adams are dealing with grief—the older has recently lost his wife (Zoe Saldana), while the younger is still coping with Louis’s death the year prior—and you’re left with a film that’s as overstuffed with incident as it is with saccharine family drama. There’s a lot of talk of potentially “catastrophic changes to the time stream,” but it’s The Adam Project’s over-complicated narrative that borders on catastrophic.
While Scobell, in his first performance, holds his own alongside Reynolds, there’s only so much that one can take of the ultra-sarcastic shtick that’s become Reynolds’s stock and trade, which The Adam Project’s scenario, by design, dials up to an inordinate degree. The highlight of the film is a scene where Reynolds’s Adam reads the riot act to two bullies from his youth, telling one, “I will pull bones out of your body. I will sharpen them and I will use them to stab little Chuckie over here.” As far as corkers go, it doesn’t hold a candle to this one, but it will do.
Once the laughter fades, though, it’s hard not to feel as if the film’s humor exists as a kind of filler. And in the case of the scene above, it kicks up inconsistencies of logic that can’t be chalked up to the time travel paradox. A show of wish fulfillment like much of The Adam Project, the scene hinges on the older Adam trying to prevent his trauma but has little to say about how he processes that trauma. Which makes it all the stranger to then hear him tell his younger self, “You don’t go from being you to being me without getting your ass kicked a lot.”
Elsewhere, the supporting cast—including Ruffalo and Jennifer Garner as Adam’s parents and Catherine Keener as the obligatory antagonist who gets her hands on Louis’s time-travel technology—is by and large committed to bringing a sense of emotional complication to their characters. But as with Saldana, they’re given so little individual screen time that those characters never rise above being two-dimensional. Most of what we learn about these characters is through the older Adam’s off-the-cuff comments to his younger self.
And when The Adam Project attempts to wring every drop of sentiment from the reunions between Adam and his loved ones, it feels mostly unearned, since before any of them show up, the viewer has no stake in their relationships or understanding of them as people. We merely know that Adam misses them, and as such all the heavy strings on the soundtrack and everyone’s teary eyes are closer to treacle than the genuinely heartfelt.
One exception is a poignant scene where the older Adam consoles his mother, unaware she’s speaking to a future version of her son, and assures her that she’s doing a great job as a mom. Otherwise, The Adam Project gives short shrift to each of its numerous plotlines, including an action-heavy sci-fi storyline complete with its own separate revenge tale. Ultimately, the film tries so hard to do so much that it doesn’t end up doing any of it particularly well.
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