It’s a weird thing to sit back and realize that the closest analog we have to Ryan Reynolds in other parts of the film world is Melissa McCarthy. Both started their careers as generalists: McCarthy on Gilmore Girls, Reynolds in the mixtures of action, comedy, and drama films that he did in his early work, with occasional interesting experiences in between, before finding mega-success. For McCarthy, that film was Bridesmaids, for Reynolds, that film was Deadpool, both of which locked them into kind of a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t career trajectory that discouraged them from risk. It’s kind of amusing to consider that, in the two or three years before that hit, Reynolds worked with Marjan Satrapi, Atom Egoyan, Tarsem, and the directing duo of Anna Fleck & Ryan Boden — an interesting list of directors, if not a wholly great one, given the periods they were at in their careers — and has since never been able to work on a project with the same amount of daring. While McCarthy’s had some success in breaking the cycle since stagnation (Can You Ever Forgive Me is a wonderful film), neither has done it very much since those successes, and though the douche-with-heart-of-gold persona has been a feature of Reynolds’ work for about two decades now, it’s worth remembering that he hasn’t always been like this, and, perhaps, it might have been a better choice if he gave it up altogether, though perhaps not for his wallet.
Case in point: Shawn Levy’s The Adam Project, a time-travel adventure centering around a present-day kid (Adam Scobell) meeting his badass future self, played by Reynolds, who is fleeing the forces of an evil corporation that controls time itself. Before you sit back and say, “Wait, I saw that Bruce Willis movie,” it’s important to note that this isn’t about a gruff time-traveling pilot learning to find his inner child or something like that, it’s more about him coming in, through sheer happenstance, to become a surrogate father to himself as a kid. Not like that, either, Jesus Christ. See, young Adam’s in a bad place — who wouldn’t be after their beloved dad died (a gruffalo Mark Ruffalo)? He’s also on the verge of being a teenager, he’s got a big mouth (and they cast this role well, given how much Scobell both looks and acts like a young Reynolds would), he’s being bullied, and his pain has consumed him so much that he’s a shithead to his mom (Jennifer Garner), who’s trying to put up a brave face for her kid. But when he discovers a gut-shot future him, wounded while on a quest to find out what happened to his wife (Zoe Saldana), a fellow pilot who went on a mission she never returned from, lying in his dad’s workshop, he’s about to find out a whole lot about future tech, time travel paradoxes, ass-kicking and how to process grief.
All the things you’d expect from a Levy film are well-represented within The Adam Project. It’s full of generally clean and well-cut action that is both occasionally clever (there’s a fun sequence set near a particle accelerator at the end full of magnetized goofiness) and just a little bit too digital for its own good, with people exploding into star-stuff to keep things from getting too real. Goofy humor is a keystone, even if it’s not going to make anybody over the age of 18 laugh very much, which is basically Reynolds’ audience at this point. You better bet there are some wacky needle drops here as well (the way that Zeppelin is deployed here is the most ridiculous boomer shit I’ve seen in some time, and Levy deserves some props for that). But I think the most essential aspect of Levy’s filmography is its naked commitment to sentiment, which occasionally pays off when all the other aspects hum and vibe, Real Steel being the best of these, and can become saccharine when deployed poorly (Night at the Museum, etc.). Now, sentiment is often a quality of good fantasy, whether it’s concretely baked into the text of the work like within Tolkien’s or Lucas’s or simply an aesthetic yearning for a time period or setting that one can never fully witness, and make no mistake because, despite their recent sci-fi trappings, Levy makes fantasies, and as such, he’s never quite far away from tugging on the heartstrings.
It’s this aspect of The Adam Project that works quite well, all things considered, as Levy’s appeals to pathos often hit home: If one was blessed to have a family that loved them and that they loved in return, who wouldn’t want to go back and provide advice and comfort to their mother in a moment of sorrow? Who wouldn’t want to see their long-dead dad one last time and receive the goodbye you never got? And, importantly, who wouldn’t want to go back and intervene in their younger self’s life at the moment they precisely needed a hand? What’s genuinely surprising is how often Reynolds rises to the occasion here, displaying a kind of earnest vulnerability as the layers upon layers of bullshit he’s propped up over the course of his life give way to these very real yet utterly impossible human wants. There’s a genuinely heartbreaking scene in which he encounters Garner in a bar and offers up words of advice to her that are delivered with a conviction uncommon to the actor, as he fights to hold back tears while asking that she show her son that she’s hurting from this incalculable loss as well, which makes it all the more frustrating when Levy leans on Reynolds’ riffing in order to try and milk cheap yuks from the viewers at home. It’s strange, too, because I believe he’s got it in him to do a Can You Ever Forgive Me if he really wanted to, a role that leaned more on his skills as an effective communicator of relatable emotion rather than the guy that rolls out long and overly complicated analogies as a form of humor, and I think this is proof of that. This is all to say that The Adam Project isn’t bad in the slightest — hell, it is a more complete film than the interesting-yet-goofy Free Guy, and had it been released into cinemas in its place the world would probably be a healthier place — but it’s one that’s let down by the fact that it has to be a Ryan Reynolds movie before it can be anything else.