The Adam Project

Directed by Shawn Levy, The Adam Project follows time-traveling fighter pilot Adam Reed (Ryan Reynolds) as he returns to the year 2022 to enlist the assistance of his younger self (Walker Scobell) to complete a world-altering mission. It’s a decidedly irresistible premise that’s employed to watchable yet predominantly underwhelming effect by Levy, as the filmmaker, armed with Jonathan Tropper, T.S. Nowlin, Jennifer Flackett, and Mark Levin’s screenplay, delivers a slick thriller that contains little in the way of attention-grabbing, wholly original elements – with the movie, for the most part, essentially coming off as a mashup of various other similarly-themed endeavors (ie the picture, generally speaking, contains no real identity of its own). There’s nevertheless little doubt that The Adam Project fares best in its briskly-paced and somewhat promising first half, as the film benefits from Reynolds’ predictably winning work and a very small smattering of admittedly engrossing sequences – with the best and most potent example of the latter undoubtedly Adam’s all-too-brief encounter with his mother (Jennifer Garner’s Ellie) inside a local pub. The production’s shift from passable to tedious is triggered by a distressingly ineffective third act rife with questionable elements, including a shockingly shoddy CGI-created character and a weak, special-effects laden climax, which ultimately ensures that the final emotional beats are hardly able to pack the heartwrenching punch Levy has obviously intended – with the end result a fairly misguided piece of work that rarely lives up to the potential of its seemingly foolproof setup.

** out of ****