Welcome to The Morning After, where I share with you what movies I’ve seen over the past week. Below, you will find short reviews of those movies along with a star rating. Full length reviews may come at a later date.

So, here is what I watched this past week:

The Adam Project

When you watch a Ryan Reynolds movie, you come to expect a high level of snark. That’s his brand. Is it necessary to every storyline? No. Yet, The Adam Project turned his wisecracking into a compelling narrative device, but the surrounding film seems built on the idea that a film can get by solely on Reynolds’ persona.

The Adam Project is about a man who tries to time travel back to 2018 in order to save the wife (Zoe Saldaña) who is presumed died in a crash to that time period. He inadvertently ends up in 2022 with his younger self (Walker Scobell) trying to adapt to the trauma of his father’s (Mark Ruffalo) passing. The film then makes several comments on time travel, the dangerousness of it, and the end result of such messiness. Things are compounded by a future billionaire (Catherine Keener) who chases him back in time to stop him from finding out the truth.

Reynolds does what he does best even if he brings little else to the role. His moments of pathos aren’t particularly compelling, but that’s a fault of a weak script. This is one of the hazards of screenwriting by committee. It works for animated films, but for live-action features, it’s often a warning sign of things to come. Scobell does well emulating Reynolds’ attitude as a youngster and it plays quite well into the narrative, but this isn’t a coming-of-age film, it’s a film about dealing with trauma and is largely superficial.

It’s fun, though, and that’s probably all we could expect from a film like this. The depth is superficial, the performances are largely familiar, and the actors don’t seem to be working terribly hard to overcome the script’s issues. Director Shawn Levy doesn’t add much to the affair as the style is limited and the substance is minimal. If all you’re looking for is a good waste of a couple of hours, this would suffice, but if you’re wanting something a bit deeper about familial dynamics, you’ll want to look elsewhere.