- UK release: March 2022 (Netflix)
- Director: Shawn Levy · Writers: Jonathan Tropper, T. S. Nowlin, Jennifer Flackett, Mark Levin
- Studio / distributor: Skydance Media; 21 Laps Entertainment; Maximum Effort; Netflix
- Genre: Science fiction adventure / family time-travel comedy · Runtime: 106 minutes (BBFC 12)
- Main cast: Ryan Reynolds (Deadpool, Free Guy) as Adam Reed; Walker Scobell as young Adam; Mark Ruffalo (Spotlight, The Avengers) as Louis Reed; Jennifer Garner (Alias, 13 Going on 30) as Ellie Reed; Zoe Saldaña (Avatar, Guardians of the Galaxy) as Laura
- IMDb: 6.7 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 68% critics / 73% audience · My rating: 8 / 10
Shawn Levy and Ryan Reynolds clearly had fun on Free Guy last year, and The Adam Project arrives as the second instalment of what is starting to look like a working partnership. This one drops straight onto Netflix rather than into cinemas, and it wears its inspirations openly: a kid, a grown man, a piece of impossible technology, and a journey through time to set something right. The film it most wants to be is Back to the Future, by way of Flight of the Navigator, and it is not embarrassed about that for a second. The surprise is how much of it lands on feeling rather than mechanics.
The setup
A fighter pilot from 2050, Adam Reed, steals a time-jet and crash-lands in 2022, well off his intended mark, and finds himself sheltering in his own childhood home. There he runs into the one person he was never supposed to meet: himself at twelve, a mouthy, asthmatic kid still raw from losing his father. The older Adam needs the younger one to get the jet working again and to reach a fixed point further back, where the technology that breaks the future was first switched on. What starts as a salvage mission turns into something the adult version has spent decades avoiding, a reckoning with the family he left behind and the grief he never properly faced. The plot moves on time-travel rails you will recognise, and the script knows you recognise them; it spends its energy elsewhere.
The cast
The film lives or dies on whether you buy the two Adams as the same person, and the casting solves that early. Walker Scobell, in his first real role, does an uncanny job of doing Ryan Reynolds, the same clipped sarcasm and rapid deflection, only without the years of armour. Reynolds plays the older model with a tiredness under the patter that he does not always let himself reach, the wisecracks worn thin from use. Their double act is the best thing here, two people who are each other’s least favourite company forced to share a cockpit.
Around them the casting is shrewd. Mark Ruffalo brings his usual rumpled decency to Louis Reed, the physicist father whose work set all of this in motion, and his scenes with both Adams carry the emotional load the action cannot. Jennifer Garner has less to do as the widowed mother but makes a single late conversation count for a great deal. Zoe Saldaña turns up as a fellow pilot from the future and reminds you, in not many minutes, how much presence she can bring to a thinly written part.
The craft
Levy directs this as a brisk, good-natured ride rather than a puzzle box. Tobias Schliessler’s photography keeps the woods and the lake-house autumn looking like a memory, which suits a film about going home. The action is clean and weightless in the modern Netflix manner, lightsaber-adjacent energy weapons and a fair amount of digital sheen, and it never threatens to overwhelm the human business at the centre. Rob Simonsen’s score does a lot of quiet work, and the soundtrack reaches for a few obvious needle-drops that earn their place. At 106 minutes the film does not outstay itself, which on a streaming platform built for second-screen drifting is no small virtue.
How it stacks up
The obvious touchstone is Back to the Future, and The Adam Project cannot match Zemeckis for clockwork plotting; its time logic is best not poked too hard. Where it scores is on the territory of Frequency, the idea that the real wound a time machine can heal is a family one, a son getting to say the thing to a parent that life never allowed. It is warmer and less wide-eyed than Flight of the Navigator, and it shares the comic register of Free Guy without that film’s high concept. None of these comparisons flatter it, exactly, but they place it in good company, the company of films that use science fiction to get at something domestic.
Critics versus the rest of us
The critical verdict is mixed-positive, hovering around 68%, with audiences a little warmer at 73%. The recurring complaint is fair: this is familiar, derivative, a film assembled from parts you have seen before. I would not argue with a word of it, and I still think it is being marked a touch harshly. The familiarity is the point of the exercise, not a failure of it; the film is doing on purpose what the eighties adventures did by instinct, and the cast sell the sentiment well enough to carry the parts that are second-hand.
Verdict
This is comfort cinema done with more care than it had to be. The two-Adams conceit gives it a genuine spine, the supporting cast lift the quieter scenes above their weight, and the whole thing is paced to be watched again on a wet Sunday without effort. It is not clever about time travel and it is not trying to be. What it gets right is the feeling, a film about wishing you could go back and say the right thing, told with enough wit to stop it turning maudlin. I will happily rewatch it, which counts for a lot in my book. 8⁄10.
Availability: Streaming on Netflix worldwide from 11 March 2022.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: The Adam Project settled in as one of Netflix’s most-watched films of its year, and the Levy and Reynolds partnership rolled straight on, the pair reuniting on the cinema-scale Deadpool & Wolverine in 2024. The film remains a Netflix exclusive and has become exactly the kind of reliable rewatch it was built to be.
BBFC content advice
Rated 12 by the BBFC for language, threat, violence. The notes below may contain spoilers.
The BBFC classified the film 12 for its Netflix streaming release (classified 10 March 2022), with the consumer advice language, threat, violence. The full per-category Content Advice (Violence, Threat and horror, Language) could not be retrieved from the BBFC release page at the time of writing; only the short consumer advice line above is quoted here.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
