Why the Ryan Reynolds Family-Friendly Rebrand Feels So Phony

Say this for Ryan Reynolds: The man works hard. His quips may sound tossed-off and his range of late may look minimal, to the point of wondering whether his production-company name Maximum Effort isn’t a self-deprecating goof, but when he wants something, he goes after it. Look at his superhero career: He showed clear interest in the genre when it was still in its initial early-2000s boom, jumping onto the Blade series for its third installment, Blade: Trinity, which inspired talk of spinning his and Jessica Biel’s characters off into their own vampire-hunting series. When that didn’t pan out, he played Wade Wilson, the man who would be Deadpool, a supporting role in 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine. That movie quite literally mangled his character by the end; undaunted, Reynolds moved over to DC and got himself cast as Hal Jordan in Green Lantern. It became one of his highest-grossing movies as a lead, and also one of his least successful in terms of optics. He did a non-superhero comics adaptation (R.I.P.D.) before finally cajoling Hollywood into letting him give Deadpool another shot. The movie bearing his name (and knocking plenty of his past movies) finally hit, creating his signature franchise. A new Deadpool sequel is out in a few months, introducing him into the MCU and likely becoming one of the biggest movies of the summer.

In the meantime, Reynolds seems hellbent on doing for family-friendly, imitation-Amblin entertainment what he did for superheroes: Make a hit by sheer force of will or possibly stubbornness. IF, the new John Krasinski movie about kids and their imaginary friends, is the third such Reynolds project of the past three years, following Free Guy (in which Reynolds plays a happy-go-lucky nonplayable character who gains sentience) and The Adam Project (in which Reynolds plays a time traveler who visits his younger self). IF, as with the other two, eases up on Reynolds’ trademark smarm ‘n snark act, turning him into a figure of mild exasperation as he grudgingly volunteers to fix up abandoned imaginary friends (or IFs) with children who might appreciate their whimsy anew.

It feels a little like a metaphor for the actor’s post-Deadpool career, forever hustling to fix up the audience with the correct levels of nostalgia, comedy, magic, emotion, and splashy visual effects. Only this time, Reynolds isn’t bouncing from disappointment to flop. Free Guy was a post-pandemic hit. It’s harder to measure how The Adam Project did as a Netflix movie, but it turns up on a lot of lists of the platform’s most-viewed original movies, and Reynolds certainly remains in demand at various spenders eager to simulate big-studio events. In fact, judging by his appearances in 6 Underground and Red Notice (also Netflix), plus Spirited and the upcoming Mayday (both from Apple), he’s exactly what streaming executives have in mind when they picture a movie star in the 2020s.

And why shouldn’t they? He’s handsome but not babyfaced, always willing to hop to his various promotional duties, nominally self-deprecating, and big in the superhero world without feeling exclusively of it. He even seems to have a taste for original screenplays; IF, Free Guy, and The Adam Project all qualify, at least by Oscar rules. He also pals it up across other megaproductions; in recent years, he’s done cameos in Bullet Train (with Brad Pitt), Ghosted (with Chris Evans and Ana de Armas), and Hobbs & Shaw (with Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham), creating the impression of someone at their collective level. (Honestly, he’s probably a bigger star than Evans, among others.)

Why, then, does this recent trilogy of family-friendly originals feel so needy? Reynolds got his start as a comedy star, so it makes sense that he carries with him a bit of audience-courting desperation disguised as nonchalance and self-deprecation. (Again, it’s the kind of pose Deadpool might strike and then goof on.) But in IF, he responds to the movie’s Robin Williams-y desire for tearful laughs by receding, keeping the whole movie at arm’s length, never really nailing a big laugh and treating his big emotional scene almost as a postscript. It’s hard to blame him, because the movie is pretty bad. Yet something drew him to this maudlin cutesiness in the first place, just as the synthetic time-warped awesome-’80s pastiche of Adam Project appeared to speak to some badge-of-honor appreciation for the kind of broad references Deadpool might make. He comes across like a Gen-Xer trying to get people psyched about his selling out.

Selling out is relative, of course. Plenty of big stars have crappy mainstream movies dotting their filmography, and Reynolds has given some terrific performances. In Adventureland, he plays an aloof cool-guy mechanic who cheats on his wife with an emotionally fragile young woman played by Kristen Stewart, to the chagrin of the amusement park employee (Jesse Eisenberg) who looks up to him (and nurses a powerful crush on her). Like Tom Cruise’s would-be/never-was hot-shot in War of the Worlds, the character plays a bit like the then-prince of frat-guy comedy faves imagining what it would be like if he got himself stuck in townie smallness. There’s even more desperation in Mississippi Grind, which turns the actor’s slickness into something seedier and, as such, oddly more compelling in an unofficial remake of Robert Altman’s California Split.

Reynolds doesn’t need to be this guy 24/7. He obviously likes being a movie star, likes owning a football club, likes shilling for financial products or whatever. Part of what makes his recent movies seem so phony, though, is that they play more like additions to his portfolio than the heartfelt paeans to childhood wonder that they’re supposed to. The effort’s in the branding, not the performances.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.