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The Adam Project is a time-travelling adventure from Shawn Levy, the director of such effective, if synthetic, fantasias as the Night at the Museum sequence and Free Guy.
The temporal leapfrogging is entirely appropriate for a project that seems to hark back to a distant era of family entertainment, and equally invites several “what ifs?” Originating screenwriter TS Nowlin, who has credits on such uninspiring titles as The Maze Runner series and Pacific Rim: Uprising, initially penned The Adam Project as a spec script for Paramount Pictures.
In 2012, Tom Cruise was attached to star, a perplexing notion for any number of reasons. The Cruiser may have many talents, but Spielbergian absent dad stand-in is not his best look. Just check out his estranged daddy in 2005’s War of the Worlds. And he was playing an actual dad as directed by the real Spielberg.
The Adam Project introduces not just one absent father figure but, using gobbledygook physics and CG spaceships, a small plethora of them.
Say hello to Ryan Reynolds playing Adam, a wisecracking Ryan Reynolds type, who, early in the film, flies out of troubled 2050 and into 2022, where the younger Adam (Walker Scobell, doing an excellent approximation of the older actor) is a wisecracking Ryan Reynolds type, still mourning the loss of his father and making life tricky for his long-suffering mother (Jennifer Garner). They bond. Shenanigans ensue. The two Adams soon jump toward 2018 to meet their still-living dad (Mark Ruffalo) and take on his nefarious partner (played by two versions of Catherine Keener, one of which works).
This is the kind of post-Goonies family-oriented schmaltz that plays very well on Netflix (see all of Stranger Things, a show sometimes directed by Levy) and not so well in cinemas. The boys have fun punching each other and exchanging quips in a film that improves on Reynolds’s last collaboration with director Levy (Free Guy) and vastly improves on the actor’s previous most recent Netflix movie (Red Notice, of which we’ll say no more.)
If only the girls were afforded the same high-jinks. Zoe Saldana and Keener come and go in underwritten roles. Poor old Jennifer Garner, meanwhile, reunites briefly with her 13 Going On 30 co-star Ruffalo, for what turns out to be the 13,756th dull, dewy-eyed mom role of her career. She’s better than this. Free Jennifer Garner!