The Adam Project Review
Director Shawn Levy, the man behind such less-than-critically-respected crowdpleasers as the Night of the Museum series, and Cheaper by the Dozen, had one of the biggest hits of his career last year with Free Guy, the inventive, video-game-inside-the-movie adventure that starred Ryan Reynolds.
Now, just a few months later, Levy has reunited with Reynolds for The Adam Project, a time-traveling, sci-fi adventure that’s not nearly as successful as the director and star’s last collaboration.
The film’s visual look is drab and boring to the point of anonymity, sporting none of the inventiveness we saw in Free Guy, which actually looked cool.
The Adam Project is a high-concept time-travel story that lifts a long list of thematic and plot elements from older, better films on the topic.
Young actor Walker Scobel plays Adam Reed, who lives with his single mother (Jennifer Garner) shortly after the death of his father. Soon after, Adam is visited by a future version of himself (played by Reynolds) who accidentally returned to the present day.
It’s up to the two Adams to team in order to defeat an evil corporation (led by Catherine Keener), while also finding a way to move a little bit further into the past to meet their late father (Mark Ruffalo) — the Miles Dyson figure who happened to invent time travel — and resolve all outstanding issues with them.
Originally titled Our Name Is Adam – which is, let’s face it, a much better title — just about every idea in The Adam Project is something we’ve seen before, which is quite tiresome.
The idea of child and adult versions of the same person reunited through time travel is so well-worn that it’s happened in two different movies involving Bruce Willis (Disney’s The Kid and Looper.) One key plot twist seems lifted straight from Looper itself, while The Adam Project‘s lone interesting idea — the idea of a fatherless boy finding a new father figure in an older version of himself — is buried under ten other things, of wildly varying stakes and tones.
The film introduces various plot complications, from time travel conspiracies to betting in the past based on inside information to the future to the prospect of a guy dating his own mom, that was already dealt with decades ago in the Back to the Future movies.
There are lifts from the Terminator mythology as well, as well as multiple nods to Avengers: Endgame, beyond just the time travel and the presence of Ruffalo. All of the father/son pathos here was done better in the John Slattery sequence in Endgame– that is, when the movie’s not lifting straight from Field of Dreams instead.
What I found even more bothersome than that is that the film doesn’t seem to care all that much about the nature of time travel and the paradoxes that could arrive as a result of it. It gestures at them and even makes a couple of jokes about it.
It’s also not so great that the action sequences are boring and uninventive, with the exception of one that does creative things with electromagnetic pulses.
Much more than Free Guy, The Adam Project reminds me more of Reynolds’ other hit from 2021, Red Notice, which was also for Netflix: Like that movie, it’s going to be watched a ton, will probably hold the #1 spot on Netflix’s top ten list for a couple of weeks, and almost no one will remember a single thing about it 24 hours after watching it.
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