Adam Bomb

I dropped down to 2 DVDs at a time, with the intention to watch more streaming. So we tried the new Ryan Reynolds, The Adam Project (2022).

Adam is Walker Scobell, a twerpy 12-year old. His dad has recently died, he gets bullied at school and suspended when he fights back. He torments his mom, Jennifer Garner, but like in a loving way. Adam is also Ryan Reynolds, a fighter pilot in the future who uses his time machine to go back to before the death of his father, against orders from Katherine Keener, ruler of the world in the future.

But he miscalculates and crashes in young Adam's backyard. (By the way, he lives in a very cool modern house in a temperate rainforest-like environment. His dad must have been a Seattle millionaire.) Young Adam figures it out pretty quickly - actually, their dog does, now just a pup.

Reynolds is very annoyed at Scobell, and Scobell wants to know how a skinny 4-foot 12-year old grows up to be Reynolds. Garner thinks he's sort of cute, which is embarrassing. Anyway, Reynolds needs to find his lover, Zoe Saldana. It turns out that she got stuck in the same past, and when they re-unite, they are pursued by futurians on space bikes. This is the action scene we saw in the trailer, and about the only one in the movie.

Anyway, they go back again to find their father, who is Mark Ruffalo. It turns out that he discovered time travel, and Keener stole it from him when he died (or was he killed?). They try to get him to destroy his invention, but he doesn't want to disrupt the time stream any more than it has been. But He bonds with his son, older and younger, in a tender and extremely manipulative scene. At least Reynolds has the grace to be embarrassed by it.

Finally, Keener from the future shows up and they, along with de-aged present-time Keener, have a big showdown at the particle accelerator. As she threatens them with a gun, Ruffalo nobly tells them to get behind him. When Keener says it's an armor piercing round which will go right through the three of them, he suggests they spread out. SPOILER - She shoots, the magnetic field of the accelerator attracts the bullet, it goes through younger Keener, so older Keener vanishes, never having existed. More bonding and personal growth, happy endings all around.

This wasn't bas at all. But it wasn't great, especially considering the stacked cast. I have complained about movies with daddy issues before, but this one really wallowed in it. Also, I thought Reynolds and maybe Ruffalo would be a lot funnier. The whole thing could have been much better. Typical streaming movie.