Time-travel adventure The Adam Project sends the Free Guy team to middlebrow blandness

Shawn Levy is an interesting filmmaker—at the very least as a case study if not a creative force, though maybe that too. A workhorse director (13 films in the last two decades) and prolific, very hands-on producer (the zeitgeist hit Stranger Things, of course, but also no less than an additional 18 movies, including The Spectacular Now and Arrival), Levy has nonetheless mostly avoided both the rewards and attendant burdens of mainstream, brandname auteur recognition.

That seemed to potentially change last year with the COVID-delayed release of the action comedy Free Guy, which both delighted audiences and amused critics, en route to a $332 million worldwide theatrical gross—the highest of 2021 for a movie that wasn’t a sequel and/or comic book adaptation. Levy’s latest effort, the science-fiction-tinged The Adam Project, reunites him with leading man Ryan Reynolds in the story of a rogue time traveler who, attempting to save the future, accidentally lands in 2022 and connects with a younger version of himself. Unfortunately, it represents a creative step backward for Levy as easily forgotten filler entertainment.

The film opens in 2050 with Adam Reed (Reynolds) fleeing in a stolen fighter jet to make a wormhole jump back in time. Missing his target of 2018, he comes into contact with his 12-year-old self (Walker Scobell), who lives alone with his mother Ellie (Jennifer Garner), after his father Louis (Mark Ruffalo) died in a car accident a year-and-a-half earlier. Since “time jets” are coded to one’s DNA, the Adams pair up, setting out to find his (their?) missing wife Laura (Zoe Saldaña) while also staying one step ahead of Maya Sorian (Catherine Keener), Louis’ villainous partner and research funder.

The main problem with The Adam Project isn’t so much that its themes and plotting recall other, better movies, though there is certainly some of that. It’s that the movie isn’t smart or ambitious enough to meaningfully engage with the ideas that would make it stick in the minds of viewers. There’s not much applied intellectual rigor here, no convincingly carved dramatic through lines that speak to who these characters actually are.

The entire film defaults to a glossy, propulsive “journey” that its makers would likely seek to define as populist or broad-appeal, but comes across as generic and listless. There are scenes, like its opening sequence, which could be legitimately scary or at least tension-filled, but aren’t, because the movie is so invested in flogging older Adam’s ironic detachment, or younger Adam’s wonderment. There are also missed moments that could lean into mining the pain of losing a parent, revealing Adam’s use of humor as a mask for his burgeoning anger.

Instead, The Adam Project tosses out some one-liners about this and other traits, but eschews developing scenes that would make a viewer feel even momentarily uncomfortable or unmoored. The movie makes a commitment to connect its two iterations of Adam chiefly through their love of a quip, and then proceeds in herky-jerky fashion to alternate action sequences with a curated collection of scenes from a well-worn time-travel narrative checklist.

One of these bits, a sequence in which the older Adam crosses paths with his mother nursing a moment of wounded melancholy in a bar, does emotionally connect, mostly because of the wholehearted investment of Reynolds and Garner’s smart choices to balance warmth and withholding. Others such as Adam interrupting a beatdown by bullies of his adolescent self fall flat because they come across as perfunctory nods to the idea of the scene rather than being smoothly integrated into a larger narrative.

There is ostensibly a mystery driving Adam’s quest back in time, but it’s haphazardly explained and so lazily linked to a vague dystopia as to make the movie’s actual plot feel rather irrelevant. The film also never really decides upon a clear-cut motivation for its antagonist, which leads to an awkward, nonsensical, and dubiously rendered scene of Maya being scolded by a version of her younger self for choices that the latter freely made.

Despite these shortcomings, the cast gamely helps pull The Adam Project along. Reynolds is inarguably the right type of actor for this material, adept at both jokey asides and swallowed, dewey-eyed wistfulness. Ruffalo delivers a solid performance, and Garner and Saldaña each acquit themselves in smaller roles. Young Scobell also cuts a very appealing figure.

Time-travel narratives retain an enduring, cross-generational appeal, as they can accommodate both fanciful imagination and heavy nostalgia, childlike awe and adult regrets. The makers of The Adam Project know this, at least. But with an overworked script that checks boxes rather than delivers compelling characters, this effort lands as perfectly bland.