Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
In the Adam Project, Ryan Reynold’s Adam Reed finds himself living in a 2050’s dystopia, albeit the kind of dystopia that we’re told is a dystopia without much in the way of backup. At any rate, it’s bad enough that after his wife goes missing in suspicious circumstances, he steals a time-jet and goes after her. Oh, yes, time travel exists. Should perhaps have mentioned that.
The time cops aren’t best pleased by this idea and set off in pursuit, which is enough to knock Adam off his intended time-jectory and land perilously close to his 12-year old self, played by Walker Scobell, still trying to get over the recent death of his father, and bullied for, well, acting like a young Ryan Reynolds, mainly. He’s bullied for being short and asthmatic, very far from the hunk of muscle that we’re supposed to accept Ryan Reynolds is. Ryan Reynolds produced this film. Just sayin’.
Anyhoo, the Adams soon meet up, clash and then bond, just as well as old Adam is too injured for the DNA-coded time-jet to allow him to fly it, but can be fooled by Young Adam’s presence. Just in time, as the time-cops, minions of Catherine Keener’s Maya Sorian, apparently the iron-fisted ruler of 2050, show up and start raising hell, only to be thwarted by Adam’s wife, Zoe Saldaña’s Laura Shane, ultimately only to distract the time-fascists to allow both Adams to jump a few years into the past to solve the problem by convincing their Dad, Mark Ruffalo’s Louis, to un-invent the precepts of time travel he’d come up with, in partnership with the treacherous Sorian.
And so it goes, to skip over a bunch of details that didn’t seem all that important to consider while watching it and even less so some days removed, which perhaps surprisingly is not to say I didn’t get some enjoyment out of The Adam Project. Now, a lot of the will depend on your tolerance for Ryan Reynolds, who here is playing very much the Ryan Reynolds he always plays, now with a mini-me playing Ryan Reynolds as well. For some, this will be 200% more Ryan Reynolds than is strictly healthy.
Assuming you can clear that hurdle, you’re left with a fairly breezy film that’s clearly aimed at a far younger crown than I run with, with a vibe not dissimilar to The Last Starfighter, or perhaps director Shawn Levy’s previous Real Steel, if you want a less geriatric frame of reference. It’s exceedingly short on detail in its world, and it’s plot, doing an awful lot of telling rather than showing, and frankly it’s almost mis-categorised as a sci-fi film in every aspect other than the visuals.
Still, it has a couple of decent action flurries to keep the interest levels acceptable, while the core of the story is the relationships between the two Adams, which turns out to be just the right side of the wholesome / nauseatingly sentimental line, and the support from Ruffalo and Jennifer Garner as the Adam’s mother is solid enough. Keener and Saldana are rather less well served, but that’s very much a fault of the script, rather than ability.
So, it’s not really a film aimed at me, but even so it passed the time well enough and would seem to be a competent enough production such that it should keep the tweens entertained for the evening. So I suppose it’s a success on these rather mundane grounds, and I’d have had trouble recommending this were it to involve the palaver of a trip to the cinema, but it’s right in that streaming sweet spot in terms of ease of access and competence. It’s not setting the world on fire, but at least it’s providing a slight glow.