The Adam Project review – Amblin-inspired tale is generic and emotionally inert

As a producer and director on Stranger Things, Shawn Levy is no stranger to borrowing liberally from the well of Amblin, building a world that owes almost everything to Spielberg’s ‘80s output. It’s a trick he’s repeating here for The Adam Project to far less successful results. Where Stranger Things works thanks to its charming cast and quality recreation of the era, The Adam Project is instead snarky and unable to build a world that feels remotely real or worth investing in, a mostly inert mash-up of sci-fi tropes.

We start in 2050, with Adam Reed (Ryan Reynolds) on the run from the authorities in a stolen time-travel jet, aiming to land in 2018 to pre-emptively stop the forces that currently run his dystopian world. He undershoots by a bit, though, landing in 2022, injuring himself and damaging his jet in the process, forcing him to go to his 12-year-old self (played by Walker Scobell) for help. The exact reasoning for this is explained in the first of many tedious moments of sci-fi babble exposition, but really it’s just an excuse for a father-son-esque adventure where the older Adam can teach his younger self how much more he needs to value his childhood and family.

From the off, Levy lays his Spielberg-inspiration cards on the table, from the design of younger Adam’s family home to the mysterious blue lights in the woods that first draw the Adams together, but The Adam Project is able to capture very little of the earnest warmth and heart of the films it’s paying homage to. Part of this, unavoidably, is the casting of Reynolds in the lead, his trademark audience-winking and snarky quips fitting uneasily into a story that is already struggling against its own absurdity.

Scobell, too, struggles to bring much life to his Adam role, a generically precocious kid, while Mark Ruffalo and Jennifer Garner basically just go through the motions as his parents. Meanwhile, as the baddie in both the present and future, Catherine Keener is badly miscast, and the de-ageing effects on her 2022 self are calamitous.

Despite these myriad flaws, there is some turn-your-brain-off fun to be had with The Adam Project (at least until the excruciating attempt at a sort of Pixar-style gutpunch ending), Levy keeping things moving at a quick pace and peppering in some floaty but satisfying action scenes. With the sheer number of quips being thrown at the screen, a few of them are bound to land, though this is at the expense of finding any real emotional stakes.

On top of all the Spielberg influences, the constant use of ‘80s tracks (instead of, say, anything that the Adams might have actually listened to given that they were born in 2010) makes the whole thing feel like a knock-off Guardians of the Galaxy. Very few of the sci-fi comparisons that The Adam Project invites flatter it, which is a crying shame. As uninspired as this often is, it’s still a big-budget original movie, and we desperately need more of them, just not if they’re all going to be this aggressively mediocre.

The Adam Project is now streaming on Netflix.