The Adam Project doesn't feel like a real movie. It sounds fake on the outside - Ryan Reynolds traveling back in time to meet his 12-year-old self and do battle against future soldiers might just be something you'd see on a movie poster in a very inventive showbiz satire Will see - and from the inside too. It's a combination of ideas from other popular movies that hang in there with a bit of cohesion. It's like watching a movie that hasn't been made yet.
And the strangest thing is that the Adam Project seems to know this. The biggest challenge with Reynolds has always been how to handle the primal insistence of his presence. He has a way of making everything he says feel predetermined. This can lead to some really interesting performances, and he is at his best in roles that embody this calculated quality: he made a legendary con artist/gambler in the Mississippi Grind and a steadfast patron frat brother in Van Wilder. . Last year's Free Cow wasn't great at all, but he was perfect as an NPC, a non-playable character who gets the spirit; His intelligible robotic aura for someone entirely inside a video game.
Free Guy director Shawn Levy is also the man behind The Adam Project, and the two films share almost a mental, all-you-can-eat derivation. Reynolds plays Adam Reed, who we first see piloting some sort of futuristic spacecraft in the year 2050, while healing a wound in his abdomen, he takes a time leap into the year 2022 . He descends into the woods outside the house that he lived with as a child with his widowed mother (Jennifer Garner). Twelve-year-old Adam (Walker Scobel) is cranky and asthmatic, a wise-ass constantly raised by threats. But the boy quickly realizes that this wounded, buff, cynical soldier is his future adult self, and before we know it, they are both on the next leg of Adam's mysterious mission to undo the past.
It's really not that mysterious. The time-travel technology of the future, we learn, was invented by Adam's late scientific father, Louis (Mark Ruffalo), in 2018, in collaboration with wealthy businesswoman Maya Sorian (Katherine Keener). In 2050, Sorian somehow used this technique to turn Earth into hell. (We'll have to take the film's word for it — or rather Adam's, when he notes that Terminator will be "a good day" in the future. We really don't see any such thing.) So now the two Adams have to do in 2018 and stop their father from turning time travel into a thing. in my point of view. After a certain point my mind stopped.
It's all silly enough, but at least the later parts of the movie allow us to spend some time with Ruffalo, who brings the kind of emotional openness and connectedness that Reynolds refuses. It's actually an interesting contrast between the two actors, and it could even be an interesting plot point in some future version of this movie that was put together with something like care. (Unfortunately, the great Keener isn't quite as lucky as Ruffalo. She's completely ruined. In fact, she's worse than ruined. A few later scenes that introduce us to an oddly old version of her In fact, Keener turns, through the magic of modern movie visual-effects technology, into a bad actress.)
About the premise of the movie: You probably have a lot of questions at the moment. I assure you that the Adam Project does not answer any of them. It's a movie designed to make geeks turn their noses up at geeks, who may wonder what exactly this movie's concept of time travel is about, but it's not going to satisfy even those of us who don't mind. Think movies already spend too much time trying to make all their fakes. science work. This isn't exactly Claire Dennis' High Life or Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris. Sean Levy isn't going to combat the crap-you nerd obsessives with formality.
No, Levi's just wants to entertain, which is certainly a noble goal. He's paced the film so fast that he hopes we'll have a lot of fun thinking about how it works. But it's not just dorky sci-fi stuff that goes out the window. Emotional reasoning is also discarded. When the two Adams meet, the older Adam assures us that the younger Adam is troubling as hell. And yet, the exact opposite appears to be true; The kid seems like a pretty average kid, while the adult Adam is the irritating smart-ass. Is this intentional? Do not know? Who cares? The movie has a lot of ideas, but it doesn't execute on any of them. Over and over again, it simply moves on to the next unrelated plot point. Derivatives in themselves are not always a problem. Even corporate cynicism isn't a problem. But when it's all done in this shoddy way, what follows is brash, reckless opportunism.