The Adam Project Review

The script began as a 2012 spec called Our Name Is Adam, with Paramount interested and Tom Cruise attached, and sat for eight years until Netflix revived it in 2020 for Shawn Levy and Ryan Reynolds, who had just made Free Guy together. It shows the rewrites: a time travel scheme explained twice, a villain (Catherine Keener, digitally de-aged for her younger self) who wants power and nothing more, and a finale that is mostly effects.

What works is the pairing. Walker Scobell, in his first film, does a precise small Reynolds, sarcastic and scared, and the two bicker like a comedy team. Mark Ruffalo is warm as the physicist father both versions of Adam lost, and Jennifer Garner gets the one grown-up scene, a widowed mother at a bar confiding in a stranger she does not know is her son.

IGN called it a mash-up of Back to the Future and The Last Starfighter, and Owen Gleiberman called it a total trifle, though often a diverting one. Metacritic has it at 55, and 157 million views in its first four weeks made it one of Netflix's biggest hits.