The funny thing aboutRyan Reynoldsis that his glib wise-guy shtick is still good, even as it’s getting old.
Watching him in “The Adam Project,” out on Netflix on Friday, March 11, it’s possible to enjoy the skill and timing of his comic delivery even while feeling frustration at having seen it all before. This is not the usual combination of emotions, to appreciate a person’s talent even as the talented person seems to be doing a disservice to it. Maybe in opera there’s an equivalent, such as on those occasions when you hear someone simultaneously giving a strong performance while ripping their voice to shreds. Whatever the comparison, Reynolds is not doing himself a favor by acting the same way all the time, especially in weak movies like “The Adam Project.”
The time-travel story centers on a 12-year-old boy, Adam (Walker Scobell), who is going through a difficult time. His father died recently, and he’s being mean to his nice mother (Jennifer Garner). Then one day a spaceman arrives from the year 2050, and he turns out to be Big Adam — Adam as a man in his early 40s, a motormouthed wisecracker played by none other than Reynolds.
Big Adam describes 2050 in this way: “You know ‘Terminator’? That’s a good day in 2050.”
雷诺兹的问题善于does is that people keep writing lines like that for him — lines that he can say well, that are fairly irresistible, but that at the same time limit the characters he plays.
What follows is a fairly confused story.
Big Adam is on a time-traveling mission to destroy the source of time travel, to kill that technology in the crib. To do so, he needs to go back to 2018, but instead he has landed in 2022. Big Adam has other things he wants to do as well, such as to reunite with his wife (Zoe Saldaña) and meet his long-lost father, a scientist played by Mark Ruffalo.
“The Adam Project” is so convoluted that at least twice the movie grinds to a stop as various characters explain to each other — for our benefit — what’s going on. It’s hard to follow, but the idea seems to be that time has a main flow, and then there are tributaries where time and events go in the wrong directions. The two Adams are apparently off on a tributary, which supposedly explains how they can be together at the same time. Or something like that.
Fortunately, it’s not important to understand what’s going on. “The Adam Project” may be convoluted, but it’s blithely convoluted. It makes a few feints in the direction of making sense and then keeps sending inCatherine Keener, as the villain from the future, on a mission to kill Big Adam. Each time, the screen suddenly looks like a video game, as the soundtrack blasts Boomer favorites such as Led Zeppelin’s “Good Times Bad Times” and Boston’s “Foreplay/Long Time.” The songs have nothing to do with 2050, 2022 or 2018. They’re just a distraction, though in a movie like this, distractions are welcome.
Yet a few things make “The Adam Project” a little better than bearable. In the second half of the movie, Reynolds follows Ruffalo’s lead, and the funny thing about Ruffalo’s performance is that it’s not funny at all. No one seems to have told him that he wasn’t in a serious drama. Thus, some of the inherent emotional power of the time-travel concept gets tapped, and the movie actually gets better.
There may be a lesson in this for Reynolds. Sometimes it doesn’t pay to be a wise guy.
L“The Adam Project”:Sci-fi comedy. Starring Ryan Reynolds, Walker Scobell and Mark Ruffalo. Directed by Shawn Levy. (PG-13. 106 minutes.) Streaming on Netflix starting Friday, March 11.