The sci-fi blockbuster arrives on Netflix this week.
There are three scenes scattered throughout The Adam Project that immediately remind us that, when he chooses to be, Ryan Reynolds can be an incredible actor.
It helps that in those scenes he’s assisted by some great, emotional writing, and in each scene he’s acting opposite a set of incredible performers – Jennifer Garner, Zoe Saldana, Mark Ruffalo – but the biggest assistance he gets in each of those scenes is that he simply stops trying to be funny.
In much the same way that the line between Robert Downey Jr. and Tony Stark started to blur after a while (at least RDJ tried out different accents in Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Dolittle), the line between real-life Ryan Reynolds and each and every character Ryan Reynolds has portrayed in recent years has practically disappeared.
Free Guy, Red Notice, The Hitman’s Bodyguard, 6 Underground, Hobbs & Shaw, Detective Pikachu… the last few years have just felt like Hollywood has simply asked Reynolds to copy/paste his performance in Deadpool over and over again, with the only adjustment being how much or how little he can swear.
He doesn’t swear at all in the extremely family-friendly The Adam Project, in which he plays a time-travelling fighter pilot who accidentally crash-lands in 2022, teaming up with his 12-year-old self (played by Walker Scobell, nailing the pure irritation a 12-year-old Ryan Reynolds would create) in order to save the future.
Re-teaming with Shawn Levy, the director of Free Guy, the movie borrows heavily from E.T., Flight Of The Navigator and Back To The Future, without ever threatening to approach anything near their level of quality.
A product of pandemic filming, the world of The Adam Project feels bizarrely empty, with many scenes involving two characters talking to each other in a big empty house or a big empty field or a big empty office building. Levy tries to make things more exciting with some shoot-outs and hand-to-hand combat scenes, but all of the action feels perfunctory, only there because that is what the Netflix algorithm says so.
Same goes with Reynolds’ brand of comedy, which has the same problem as his last project with Netflix, arriving toothless and massively unoriginal. If used sparingly, it might be more enjoyable, as very few actors purposefully walk the line of charming and exasperating quite like Reynolds, but we’ve seen to death by this point.
It truly is during those scenes with his mother (Garner), father (Ruffalo) and the love of his life (Saldana) that the movie finally comes to life, and you almost wish they hadn’t bothered to try to make an action movie out of this story at all, and just made it about a time-traveller trying to make up for his past mistakes.
But Deadpool was insanely popular, so now Hollywood doesn’t know what else to do with Ryan Reynolds other than have him be a handsome quip machine. Hopefully whoever he works with next has more faith in his abilities.
The Adam Project is available to watch on Netflix from Friday, 11 March.
Clips via Netflix
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