Film review: Turning Red

published 18 March 2022

Netflix is unlikely to win any awards for The Adam Project, but its new time-travel adventure is perfectly serviceable family-friendly fare, said Adrian Horton in The Guardian. Ryan Reynolds stars as Adam, a fighter pilot who steals a time jet in 2050, with a view to going back to 2018. His plan is to save the life of his future wife – but he crash-lands instead in 2022, where he meets his 12-year- old self (Walker Scobell), grieving his recently deceased father. It turns out that young Adam is an “aerospace nerd with a strong grasp of Back to the Future references”, so the pair team up. As the film proceeds, the plot gets “mind-bendy very fast”, but there’s plenty to enjoy, including “sappy yet effective depictions of loss”, slick action sequences and a satisfyingly “booming” score.

Netflix is on a Reynolds binge, said Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent; the actor has recently appeared in its movies Red Notice and 6 Underground, neither of which were good, but both of which were “easily consumable”. The director of this film, Shawn Levy, “seems convinced that there is no such thing as too much Ryan Reynolds”, and I can understand why: he’s funny, he’s Canadian, he’s conventionally attractive. Yet even he can’t redeem this film, which is hamstrung by dodgy de-ageing effects and lacks a “functional narrative”. At its “incredibly limited best”, said Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph, The Adam Project scrapes by as a “derivative popcorn flick for a rainy weekend”. But the finale is “such a botched horrorshow” it drags the whole into “outright atrocity”. Watching Netflix do its worst Marvel impression is an insult to the “very concept of dumb fun”.