I like Ryan Reynolds. He’s fun. He has uniquely quick-witted comic timing, an extremely useful secret weapon for a movie star built for action heroism with a side order of wiseacre. Also, he can well up during sincere bull’s-eye moments in ways that rival anything in anime.
I wish I liked “The Adam Project” the same way I like Ryan Reynolds. It’s fun-ish. It’s an efficiently packed time-waster that doesn’t take up much of your life (about 90 minutes without the end credits). This will not hurt its Netflix numbers any.
It has heart, wisecracks, grieving and plentiful PG-13 violence with cool weapons from the year 2050 that make people crystallize and go away. It name-checks and/or pilfers from “Back to the Future,” “The Terminator” and “Star Wars,” the last one courtesy of a lightsaber knockoff inspired by the George Lucas toy emporium. The movie has a good shot at a huge streaming audience. But does it have the creative instincts of a good movie? An OK one, yes. It’s too bad “The Adam Project” is only that, since the cast isn’t dogging the assignment for a second.
The mission here is to save the world from its hideous near-future and to prevent time travel from being invented and exploited, for personal gain, by the all-powerful tech zillionaire played by Catherine Keener. Fighter pilot Adam (Reynolds) hijacks a “time jet” from 2050 and crash-lands in 2022, four years off his target. There, shot up and bleeding, he meets his 12-year-old self (Walker Scobell) not long after Young Adam has endured another humiliating round of physical and verbal bullying at school.
Jennifer Garner plays Adam’s mother, coping uneasily with the loss of her physicist husband (Mark Ruffalo). Pursued through space and time by adversarial forces equipped with hoverboards, Future Adam soon meets up with his presumed-dead wife (Zoe Saldana), who joins the Adams in their fight to vanquish the future’s hellion-capitalists. Most of this is in the trailer. Director Shawn Levy works from a script credited to Jonathan Tropper, T.S. Nowlin, Jennifer Flackett and Mark Levin; the Nowlin version came first, and was planned as a Tom Cruise vehicle nearly a decade ago.
The scenes I like best in “The Adam Project” are simplicity incarnate. At one point, Future Adam consoles his mother (she doesn’t know it’s her son from the future) about the trouble she’s having with smart, quippy but sad and angry 12-year-old Adam. That’s the movie’s aha! moment, in and among the usual digital blasts of firepower. Later, seeing Reynolds and Ruffalo trade fours doing Aaron Sorkin-style walk-and-talks full of expository blah-blah is satisfying in a different way.
The wish-fulfillment bits, such as Future Adam threatening Young Adam’s bullying tormentor with grievous bodily harm, arrive regularly and on schedule. The pathos, tied to the loss of a parent or a loved one, gives the material some semblance of feeling. Just FYI, Future Adam tells his younger self regarding his glib, cold dismissal of his mother, “You still get sick to your stomach every time you remember how you treated her now.”
Millions will probably put up with that stuff in order to get to the next digital elimination-round battle sequence. For me, it’s the other way around. “We watched too many movies!” says Future Adam to Young Adam not long after their awkward self-meet-self introduction. Yes, they have, and this movie squeaks by thanks primarily to the actor delivering that line.
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'THE ADAM PROJECT'
2 stars (out of 4)
MPAA rating: PG-13 (violence/action, language and suggestive references)
Running time: 1:46
Where to watch: On Netflix Friday
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