Well, Netflix and Disney+ both dropped what turned out to be fairly fun movies, both with roughly the same run time, on the same day. I was working from home all week, so it was very possible for me to watch both. Why choose Turning Red first and not The Adam Project? Well, the cartoon seemed like something that would be better to watch during the day while the popcorn flick looked like it would be a better nighttime experience. That is literally my only reasoning for the order I watched the movies in.
And, honestly, I liked them both about the same in the grand scheme of things. But this review here is for the new Ryan Reynolds movie The Adam Project, so how did it go?
Sometime around the year 2050 in a dystopian future, pilot Adam Reed (Reynolds) is fleeing the authorities with a stolen jet capable of time travel. Time travel done wrong can be dangerous since changing history can cause nothing but trouble, but Adam doesn’t much care as he’s on a rescue mission. However, he ends up with his jet damaged, a bullet wound through his torso, and stuck in the year 2022. His only hope for help, for the time being at least, is from his 12 year old self (Walker Scobell). Adam’s father Louis (Mark Ruffalo) died in 2018, but he was also instrumental to the invention of time travel. However, his business partner Maya Sorian (Catherine Keener) will do anything to keep the power she has over, oh, everything, and as such, she and some minions follow Adam to the past.
Now, you’d think with that set-up like that would have Adam out trying to save his father. I mean, you don’t hire Mark Ruffalo just to pose for some family photos. What Adam is actually doing is something else, and I won’t be saying what because it was a nice moment in many ways, and the Ruffalo scenes do come later. In the meantime, both Adams will need to work together while learning from their respective experiences. Older Adam has the benefit of lived experience, but younger Adam actually remembers things that happened better than his older self. And when older Adam needs to fight, he has some skills and future weapons to balance the odds a bit.
This movie was mostly just a lot of fun. That shouldn’t be much of a surprise as this is another collaboration between Reynolds and director Shawn Levy following last year’s Free Guy. Reynolds displays his own usual effortless charm, and he has a lot of funny bits of dialogue plus some good action sequences, and even a really sweet scene where he offers comfort to his widowed mother (Jennifer Garner) without telling her who he is. Ruffalo also does a nice job as the combination of physics professor and caring father, but I expect good work from Mark Ruffalo.
But then there’s Scobell, and my first thought when I heard about this movie was young Adam would be just a standard sad movie kid. But instead, he’s just as much a smartass as adult Adam, even matching Reynolds’s pacing and delivery. It actually made it easier to believe that Scobell really was a younger Reynolds, particularly since I am not sure he looks much like him. It’s things like this that made what could have been a schlocky movie with a sci-fi twist into a nice popcorn flick for a Friday night.
Grade: B+
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