Film review: The Adam Project is riddled with plot holes but full of fun

This time-travel adventure gleefully tears up the rule book

Walker Scobell as Young Adam and Ryan Reynolds as Big Adam

★★★★☆

The first rule of time-travel, according to virtually every time-travel movie, is that you must not meet yourself in the past.

The Adam Project (12A) gleefully tears up the rule book, however, as it opens with Adam (Ryan Reynolds) hurtling back from the year 2050 in a stolen space-fighter and crashlanding in the back yard of his childhood home, where he is promptly discovered by his 12-year-old self (Walker Scobell).

There’s no time to waste figuring out the potential consequences, though: Adam has returned to his childhood era to (a) thwart Maya Sorian (Catherine Keener), who is planning to steal ‘the most precious resource in the world — time’, and (b) save his future wife Laura (Zoe Saldana), who was recently killed on Sorian’s orders. 

And so the two Adams are whirled into a life-or-death adventure that is marvellous fun, and not least because Shawn Levy’s film seems determined to mention or allude to every big sci-fi film from the past five decades — Star Wars, ET and Back to the Future are three that get a nod in the first 10 minutes alone.

Riddled with plot-holes it might be, but The Adam Project is a knowingly zany take on the time-travel flick, and will provide sci-fi fans with many a quiet chuckle.

(Netflix)