"The Adam Project" REVIEW

I'll admit it: I wasn't excited for The Adam Project. The last time Netflix collaborated with Ryan Reynolds, we got Red Notice. I liked Red Notice fine, but it hardly blew me away. Before that, Netflix and Ryan Reynolds gave us 6 Underground, which is pretty flashy, loud, and stupid. So when I heard that they were collaborating again, I put it on my to-watch list, but I didn't make it into a priority.

I fully expected Ryan Reynolds to play a Ryan Reynolds-type character. Has he ever been amazing? I know that people like him in Deadpool, but that gimmick runs a little bit thin after a while. He's snarky. He doesn't take anything seriously. He says crass and irreverent.

Did The Adam Project completely rewrite the game for him?

Ehhhhh... no.

If you like Ryan Reynolds-style comedy, you'll probably be pleased by The Adam Project. With its PG-13 rating, it's not exactly going to be Deadpool, but Ryan Reynolds is comfortably familiar for much of the movie.

However, unlike Red Notice or 6 Underground, they tried something new with The Adam Project: it's a movie that actually has heart.

I don't want to mischaracterise the movie, but there are long sequences that are dealing with the details of relationships and feelings. The movie is a bombastic sci-fi adventure, but between all of the action scenes and CGI set-pieces, what really holds the movie together are relationships. So while this isn't entirely new for Reynolds, it's not the exact same thing he and Netflix have been putting out lately either.

Ryan Reynolds plays Adam. Walker Scobell also plays Adam, just smaller. See, big Adam stole a time-travel jet and used it to jump to the past. Unfortunately for him, some other folks weren't huge fans of the whole "stealing a time-travel jet" thing, so they tried to shoot him down, which caused him to make a miscalculation. He meant to jump from 2050 to 2018, but he missed by four years, unfortunately landing in 2022.

Little Adam doesn't know anything about time-travel, but he starts to piece it together pretty quickly when a wounded pilot shows up in his dad's workshop. Cracking the case is especially easy since said pilot knows how to get into his dad's workshop, and he's wearing the watch that Adam inherited from his father when his father died in 2020.

Big Adam still needs to make it to 2018, but he also needs to protect little Adam, who is now caught up in the aftermath of big Adam's time-travel shenanigans. Turns out a whole bunch of evil dudes with sci-fi weapons are trying to force big Adam to return to 2050, and they're not going to be particularly gentle in the extraction process.

That's the sci-fi adventure meat in the picture. However, it's not the whole picture.

What the movie is actually about is four relationships. See, little Adam is struggling to connect to his mother because of his unresolved grief about the death of his father. Big Adam misses his wife, who is the reason why he got involved in time-travel shenanigans in the first place. Big Adam also needs to confront his own relationship with his dead father. And finally, little Adam and big Adam need to learn from each other.

This focus on family relationships makes the movie feel almost like a Spielberg movie from yesteryear. The adventure gets lots of time, and the action looks like it ate up a large portion of the movie's budget, but what makes it work is the human relationships at the center. The movie takes time to let those relationships breathe, and even as everything else gets profoundly weird and silly, the movie never treats the relationships as if they're just a big joke.

This is Ryan Reynolds, so I kept expecting the movie to undermine all of its sincerity with a cheap joke. And don't get me wrong, there are jokes here. However, there's also a great deal of earnestness on display that is genuinely refreshing.

The Adam Project is unlikely to receive any buzz from the Academy next year, but that's okay. It's a pleasant, distracting sci-fi adventure with a good amount of heart at the center. It might not blow you away, but it's undeniably sweet.

"The Adam Project" is available via Netflix.