The Adam Project Movie Review: Ryan Renolds, Mark Ruffalo toy with the wheels of time… all for love!

STORY: What happens when 12 YO, bully-enduring Adam Reed (Walker Scobell) meets his ripped, jet plane-flying middle-aged self (Ryan Reynolds)? Wait, older Adam doesn’t remember being too tiny for his age and younger Adam cannot fathom his future version being uber cool. So, what happened? In all his recent interviews, sci-fi enthusiast Shawn Levy has time and again emphasised on ‘The Adam Project’—direction; his venture—being a family entertainer and you will soon know why. REVIEW: When the maker of ‘Arrival’ (2016) and hit formulae ‘Stranger Things’—another of Netflix’s raging success that refuses to die down, thankfully—promises a time-travelling movie, one would expect top-notch special effects and bombastic theories pertaining to this fascinating subject. Well, Levy has, for all intents and purposes, toned down the scientific jargon in ‘The Adam Project’. It is, quite frankly, a breath of fresh air!The plotline goes as follows: in 2018, Adam’s stunning wife Laura (Zoe Saldana) was out on a mission under Maya Sorian’s (Catherine Keener) supervision, but she couldn’t make it out alive. Aware of his partner’s flying capabilities, and her knowing of never to tamper with the time streams or even tease with its discrepancies, Adam rushes back in time to right the wrong. However, as time travel is still an elusive subject to the ace pilot—and to the audience, too—the bereaved spouse lands on a different date of another year, and on the lap of his younger self. With the father of time travel long gone, and a child he literally knows is not cut out for scientific experiments, how is Adam Reed going to get to his wife? Also, if time travel is a puppet, then who’s the puppet master? Can you imagine Ryan Reynolds being in a film wearing a straight-face expression with no insult comedy on the horizon? No! So, rightly, Reynolds’ Reed is a laugh riot: charmingly condescending and his counterpart from 2022, Walker Scobell, a fitting (human) reply to his wit and wisdom. Perhaps to render relevance—and relatability—to the otherwise taut script, Levy keeps the time-travel argot to a bare minimum. We know there is a plane juggling different timelines, there’s a man looking for his wife in the past, a child who meets his future self, conniving people seeking God-esque stature in society through time travelling, and that’s pretty much it. Without questioning the intelligence of its audience, ‘The Adam Project’ navigates the complex field of quantum physics with the unspoken love and resentments of a family as its heartbeat. Levy and his dedicated cast have made it glaringly obvious already; still, for extra emphasis: ‘The Adam Project’ is an out-and-out commercial entertainer about the marvels of science. It lays out all the cards needed for a family package: there’s twisted family dynamics, a heartbroken mother, an absent father, teenage angst and middle-age disappointments. Kudos to the makers that this sci-fi flick, for the love of God, doesn’t allow any of these subtexts to overshadow one another or become overbearing, independently. The elements of intrigue may have been compromised for the sake of mass appeal, but that, in no way, takes away from the contributions of the actors. Give him humour laced with action, and Ryan Reynolds will hit any moving object out of the park (another case in point: the ‘Deadpool’ series). Mark Ruffalo’s brief role didn’t come with a lot of depth or scope but he is delightful nonetheless—“No, I cannot know the future”—he says. Also, what truly makes ‘The Adam Project’ juicier, and in a complement-ish fashion, is Jennifer Garner’s impassioned rendition of Mama Ellie Reed. Very few actresses do effortless elegance well on screen, Garner is definitely one of them. However, Shawn Levy’s secret weapon is the little stick of dynamite that is child artiste Walker Scobell. With a head full of hair and mega-expressive eyes, Scobell could very well be the next Jacob Tremblay! And that’s a big declaration to make. True, ‘The Adam Project’ neither has the intensity of ‘Stranger Things’ nor the all-knowing demeanour of ‘Arrival’—once an Oscar hopeful for Best Picture—but what it does have is a profusion of emotions: ranging from hilarity to skirmish. And, once in a while, we can all do with just that.