Time-travel adventure The Adam Project sends the Free Guy team to middlebrow blandness

The entire film defaults to a glossy, propulsive “journey” that its makers would likely seek to define as populist or broad-appeal, but comes across as generic and listless. There are scenes, like its opening sequence, which could be legitimately scary or at least tension-filled, but aren’t, because the movie is so invested in flogging older Adam’s ironic detachment, or younger Adam’s wonderment. There are also missed moments that could lean into mining the pain of losing a parent, revealing Adam’s use of humor as a mask for his burgeoning anger.

Instead, The Adam Project tosses out some one-liners about this and other traits, but eschews developing scenes that would make a viewer feel even momentarily uncomfortable or unmoored. The movie makes a commitment to connect its two iterations of Adam chiefly through their love of a quip, and then proceeds in herky-jerky fashion to alternate action sequences with a curated collection of scenes from a well-worn time-travel narrative checklist.

One of these bits, a sequence in which the older Adam crosses paths with his mother nursing a moment of wounded melancholy in a bar, does emotionally connect, mostly because of the wholehearted investment of Reynolds and Garner’s smart choices to balance warmth and withholding. Others such as Adam interrupting a beatdown by bullies of his adolescent self fall flat because they come across as perfunctory nods to the idea of the scene rather than being smoothly integrated into a larger narrative.

There is ostensibly a mystery driving Adam’s quest back in time, but it’s haphazardly explained and so lazily linked to a vague dystopia as to make the movie’s actual plot feel rather irrelevant. The film also never really decides upon a clear-cut motivation for its antagonist, which leads to an awkward, nonsensical, and dubiously rendered scene of Maya being scolded by a version of her younger self for choices that the latter freely made.

Despite these shortcomings, the cast gamely helps pull The Adam Project along. Reynolds is inarguably the right type of actor for this material, adept at both jokey asides and swallowed, dewey-eyed wistfulness. Ruffalo delivers a solid performance, and Garner and Saldaña each acquit themselves in smaller roles. Young Scobell also cuts a very appealing figure.

Time-travel narratives retain an enduring, cross-generational appeal, as they can accommodate both fanciful imagination and heavy nostalgia, childlike awe and adult regrets. The makers of The Adam Project know this, at least. But with an overworked script that checks boxes rather than delivers compelling characters, this effort lands as perfectly bland.