Review: 'The Adam Project' delivers Ryan Reynolds in wise-cracking mode, but can't deliver on its own time-travel premise

As a lifelong lover of science fiction — and a dedicated watcher of time-travel stories, who has enjoyed years of “Doctor Who” and repeated viewings of “Back to the Future” — the one thing I know about time-travel stories is this: They have to set up the rules, and then follow them.

This is what makes director Shawn Levy’s “The Adam Project” so disappointing: It doesn’t follow its own rules.

The movie begins in 2050, when time travel is a reality — though, as we’re told, it’s tightly regulated. So when hotshot time pilot Adam Reed (Ryan Reynolds) tries to steal his time-jumping jet, it naturally draws a crowd of other jets trying to shoot him out of the sky. He escapes narrowly, and lands in 2022, where he goes in search of his 12-year-old self (played by Walter Scobell).

Young Adam is a handful, a pint-sized smart-mouth regularly getting bullied, and talking back to his harried mom, Ellie (Jennifer Garner). Ellie has been flying solo as a parent for more than a year, since her mathematician husband, Louis (Mark Ruffalo), died in a car accident.

Big Adam needs young Adam so he can pilot his jet; there’s some mumbo-jumbo about a DNA signature, and the ship being able to detect that Big Adam is injured. (Just roll with it.) Big Adam is looking for his wife, Laura (Zoe Saldaña), another time traveler who was trying to get back to 2018. Her mission — which soon becomes the Adams’ mission — is to stop time travel before it starts by stopping Louis from developing the algorithm that makes time travel possible, and has been taken over by Louis’s business partner, Maya Sorian (Catherine Keener).

Director Shawn Levy is coming off a career high with “Free Guy,” but here he’s wallowing in the creative doldrums that allowed him to make “Real Steel” and three “Night at the Museum” movies. Working with a script credited to four writers, and showing the marks of many wrenches trying to tighten things up, Levy falls back on the most reliable tool in any action director’s arsenal: Ryan Reynolds’ ability to be charming and sarcastic at the same time.

It works, to a point, and certainly having Reynolds’ character bicker with his younger self is a comic goldmine. But when Levy tries to get serious and introspective, as little Adam forces Big Adam to confront the psychological pain of losing his father, the movie discovers a new kind of cinematic time travel — by making the film slow to a crawl.

The supporting cast — Keener the face of exasperated bureaucratic evil, young Scobell as a pint-sized Reynolds, and Garner and Ruffalo staging a small “13 Going on 30” reunion — is solid, but abandoned by inferior material.

The worst of that material is how the writers take pains to explain how time travel works in this story’s reality — then tossing the rules out the window when they prove inconvenient to finishing the story. “You never understood the science,” Louis says at one point, and it’s as if he’s talking to Levy on behalf of all of us.

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‘The Adam Project’

★★

Starts streaming Friday, March 11, on Netflix. Rated PG-13 for violence/action, language and suggestive references. Running time: 106 minutes.