Directed by: Shawn Levy
Starring: Ryan Reynolds, Walker Scobell, Jennifer Garner, Mark Ruffalo, Catherine Keener
Rated PG-13, 106 minutes
Time travel is to movies what a muddy dog is to a white room: an easy way to make a mess. With their endless capacity for complicating stories beyond repair, time travel plots have become something of a white whale for writers and filmmakers. Who can get away with it, and who falls into the same old traps? “The Adam Project,” however, tries another tack: What if none of the classic paradoxes actually matter? What if you let the muddy dog loose?
It’s a bold choice from the movie’s writers and from director Shawn Levy (“Free Guy”), but not one that pays dividends. Forget everything you ever thought you knew about time travel, they assert, regrettably offering no suggestions of what you should think about time travel instead. We’re left with a string of catastrophes. Ryan Reynolds (“Deadpool”), the titular Air Force pilot from 2050, comes into contact with his younger self (the first of many long-standing time travel no-nos), then takes his younger self with him as he goes farther back in time to stop the invention of time travel itself, in the process killing dozens of time-traveling henchmen, blowing up houses and labs, and rendezvousing with his time-traveling wife.
Do you remember how much trouble one sports almanac caused in “Back to the Future”? Some of us remember when actions had consequences—and that includes, incredibly, the characters of “The Adam Project.” The younger Adam (played by the promising newcomer Walker Scobell) even mentions “Back to the Future” as an example of the consequences of manipulating the past, but the older Adam silences him with a snippy “Are you out of your tiny mind?” If there’s one thing the writers here have nailed, it’s the fact that young children never ask follow-up questions.
In fairness, the movie’s plot is intended less as an exercise in sci-fi storytelling and more as a vehicle for Adam’s complicated feelings about his parents. This isn’t just lazy sci-fi for its own sake, it’s lazy sci-fi with the heart of a chatty psychoanalyst, tracing every one of Adam’s character flaws back to his dead father (Mark Ruffalo, “The Avengers”) and his grieving mother (Jennifer Garner, “Juno”), laying out his needs and fears with the subtlety of Sharpie on one’s forehead. At the movie’s emotional climax, Mark Ruffalo and Ryan Reynolds perform their version of the “It’s not your fault” scene from “Good Will Hunting,” but with far more words and far less impact. Imbued though it may be with a gracious acknowledgment of trauma and grief, “The Adam Project” talks up a storm only to lapse into the kind of 10-cent wisdom you might find on Instagram: make time for each other; tell your loved ones you love them; you only live once. If you like having dots connected for you, you might like this movie.
The saving grace is the pacing, quick and to the point, which makes the movie watchable, even entertaining, as long as you don’t ask any questions. How else could you tolerate sci-fi that’s so careless and nonchalant about its own premise? How else could you accept such cheap visuals, from the spotless Pottery Barn catalog house in which Adam and his mother live, to the crude digital effects applied to Catherine Keener (“Get Out”) to make her look 25 years younger? How else could you stomach the unsavory self-indulgence of Ryan Reynolds, who has co-produced this movie in which a 12-year-old boy looks up at him with wonder in his eyes and says, “You’re kinda ripped. Do you work out?” “Wonder in silence,” Reynolds’ Adam commands him, not out of modesty but out of contempt. That’s the movie, in a nutshell: Just shut up and take it.
The whole thing reeks of cynicism, as if Netflix assumes viewers will blindly accept a half-baked story as long as it comes with their prestigious stamp of approval. Their dog has made a mess and they have invited us to come sit on the muddy couch. In an era dominated by franchises, “The Adam Project” may be an original story (as the biblical nod in its title thankfully reminds us) but it borrows from and brings to mind so many other, better films that it’s hard not to wish you were rewatching something else, something with more lasting power. As blissfully ignorant as life in Eden, “The Adam Project” works, but only if you wipe everything else from your memory.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 3/18/22.