The Adam Project (2022) * * *

 

Directed by:  Shawn Levy

Starring:  Ryan Reynolds, Mark Ruffalo, Jennifer Garner, Catherine Keener, Walker Scobell, Zoe Saldana

Time travel movies hold a universal allure because we would all like to find a way to defeat time or at least keep it at bay.   In Shawn Levy's The Adam Project, a fighter pilot named Adam (Reynolds) in 2050 steals a plane, is shot and hit, and uses a wormhole to travel back to 2018 to somehow prevent the death of his wife Laura (Saldana) in the future. Time travel must not be an exact science, because Adam winds up in 2022 and finds himself face-to-face with his twelve-year-old self.   In 2022, Adam's father Louis (Ruffalo) has been dead a little over a year from a car accident and he and his mother Ellie (Garner) are still trying to process the loss.  The Adam of 2050, we learn, still hasn't processed his grief fully from losing his father nearly thirty years before.

Without giving away too much of the plot, Older Adam recruits Younger Adam (Scobell) to assist him in his mission.   That means traveling back to 2018, when Louis was still alive and working on the realization of time travel with his partner Sorien (Keener), who we learn steals the idea after Louis' death and transforms into a ruthless corporation owner that "owns" time travel.   Sorien dispatches nameless henchmen to kill off Adam and Laura in 2018 and again in 2022.   These are the parts of The Adam Project which work the least.   We find ourselves patiently waiting for the action sequences to be over so we can return to the poignancy of the Adams dealing with themselves and confronting their father knowing what will one day happen to him.   No matter how they try to warn Louis of his fate, Louis doesn't wish to hear it.   He wants his fate to play out as expected, so any ripples caused by the changing of events is minimal.

Ryan Reynolds reverts to the snarkiness which some of his characters are known for.   But here, his insults and snark mask deep wounds caused by the death of his father and wife which haven't healed.  The scenes involving Adam dealing with his past jerk some tears in the best possible way, much like the brilliant, but underrated Frequency (2000), in which a son is somehow able to communicate with his long-dead father via a ham radio.   Ruffalo adds dimensions by not just portraying Louis as a cold science geek, but somehow who understands the negative effects his work and long hours are having on his family.  He gathers that the pain inside both 12-year-old Adam and 40-year-old Adam are caused by the effects of his absence, even while he was alive.

The Adam Project in its best scenes is thoughtful and emotional, which makes you wish almost all of the movie were like that.   I suppose the action was thrown in as a crowd-pleasing move, but I'll bet most of the audience likes the sentimentality a whole lot more.