Directing: B-
Acting: B
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B
Special Effects: C

Watching a Ryan Reynolds action comedy is like the cinematic equivalent of eating an off-brand Hostess cupcake: clearly inferior, but tasty enough in the absence of something better. This is a pretty consistent element of Reynolds’s career, although the quasi-novel thing about The Adam Project is the inspired casting of 11-year-old Walker Scobell as Reynolds’s scrawny, 12-year-old self. This is Scobell’s first acting role, and he nails the signature Reynolds snark, just a preteen version of it.

Indeed, The Adam Project would not have been nearly as fun as it is—and it’s arguably more fun than it deserves to be—of not for the many funny quips in the dialogue, particularly between Reynolds and Scobell. Conceptually, the script of this movie is utter garbage, but I found it relatively to overlook due to the fairly consistent laughs it got out of me.

It does have a bit of a “straight to video” vibe to it. I realize that’s now an outdated phrase, but people who remember what that meant will get what I mean better than if I just call it “straight to streaming,” which is what this is. The thing is, in the streaming age, even Oscar-worthy fare sometimes gets released on streamers at the same time as their theatrical release. This has occurred with everything from Dune to The Power of the Dog. The Adam Project is nowhere near in the same league as those films, nor does it try or even pretend to be. Still I was surprised to discover it did get its own limited theatical release: it’s actually playing at the Cinemark Lincoln Square Cinemas in Bellevue.

I wonder if it plays better in a theater? Perhaps it does. It doesn’t change the definitively low-rent special effects, or the wildly derivative science fiction concepts. The plot involves time travel, an idea always rife with problems no matter how it’s approached in film. And this script, with four credited writers, goes out of its way to make its characters discuss the dangers of breaking “the rules” of time travel, then they openly break them all.

So much for meeting yourself in the past being any kind of problem. Reynolds and Scobell both play the same character, Adam, with older Adam (42, apparently) crash-landing his plane from 2050 in the woods around his childhood home in 2022. When younger Adam meets the older one, there’s about five seconds of shock, and then in practically an instant they’re both just cool with being around each other, knowing who each other is, and getting on with the task of moving the plot forward.

Here’s a curiously convenient plot point: another time jump occurs, when both Adams take the plane back to 2018. (The plane is configured to his DNA signature but won’t let him fly when he’s injured; thus, he needs young Adam’s fingerprints.) This four year gap allows The Adam Project to have its Covid cake and eat it too: it can completely ignore the pandemic without presenting an alternate universe in which it never existed. For now, anyway: the way things are going right now, in March 2022, the maskless 2022 we see in the movie feels plausible. We’ll see how things are going in another six months.

When the time jumps back to 2018, Adam’s father comes into the picture, played by Mark Ruffalo. We see Adam’s mother, played by Jennifer Garner, in both 2022 and 2018. We get a brief glimpse of 8-year-old Adam in 2018 but only long enough to see him playing video games; this movie is evidently not all that interested in Adam at that age. Further convoluting things is Catherine Keener as the villain, Maya Sorian, whose future self has gone back in time to tell her younger self, Biff-in-Back-to-the-Future-style, how to become rich and then harness time travel technology and somehow wind up controlling it all in a deeply dystopian future that is only ever referred to vaguely. “We’ve seen The Terminator, right?” older Adam says to his younger self. “That’s 2050 on a good day.” With the exception of an opening sequence of his plane in space above Earth before the first time jump, that’s all the insight we get about that future.

Speaking of Back to the Future, The Adam Project is rife with references to it. There are also clear visual homages to the fern-covered forest floor seen in E.T.; the obligatory direct references to Star Wars; and clear influences from The Matrix. There really isn’t a single even remotely original idea in this movie. I still feel compelled to give the script credit because of its consistently funny and clever dialogue, which is always just entertaining enough.

There’s also a casual charm to the chemistry between Reynolds and Scobell, if not so much between Reynolds and Zoe Saldana, who plays his wife in a thanklessly small part. It’s also notable that Catherine Keener is usually excellent, at least when cast well, but she feels bizarrely shoehorned into this movie, and to say she’s phoning it in is putting it mildly. In other words, the performances are kind of all over the place, which means they even out to being just a bit better than fine.

I’m trying to imagine someone with genuine scientific knowledge trying to swallow this movie. They’d have to be exceptionally skilled at turning their brain off. I’m no scientist myself, but I’d like to bran a little that I can be quite good at turning my brain off. With a movie like this, it’s more important to relax into the mindless entertainment it is than to pick it apart pointlessly. If you want 2001: A Space Odyssey, go watch that movie. To The Adam Project’s credit, it knows what it is and makes no claims or promises otherwise. Which is to say, it’s a cut-rate action comedy released to a streamer that will fade into the algorithmic ether within a week or two. But for now, it’ll do.

*Strap in … to your couch. With a blanket maybe.*

Overall: B-