Free Guy: Ryan Reynolds Comedy Glib Fun But No Game-Changer
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B
If you enjoyed Groundhog Day, The Truman Show, The LEGO Movie, Wreck-It Ralph, and any number of time-looping game-playing virtual scenarios, you’ll feel at home in the Ryan Reynolds’ comedy Free Guy, partly set inside a video game.
Reynolds, in a familiar role as a slightly bent, fast-quipping innocent in precarious circumstances, plays a bank teller named Guy, who discovers he’s a background figure or NPC (non-playable character) in a violent Grand Theft Auto-style open world video game. Because of an AI glitch, Guy develops self-awareness and becomes an emancipated “free guy” and a hero in his own story.
Directed by Shawn Levy (Night at the Museum) from a script by Matt Lieberman (The Addams Family) and Zak Penn (Ready Player One), Free Guy walks a line between smart-alecky and sweet. For the fan boys, it features cameos from well-known gamers and in-jokes about IP (intellectual property), sequels, cameos, and the Walt Disney Co. catalogue (including Lucasfilm and Marvel). At the same time, it promotes anti-corporate artisanship and old-fashioned romance, swing sets, and bubble-gum ice-cream.
When first we meet Guy, he’s just a mindless Fun Guy, leading a simple life, donning the same blue shirt with a name tag and khaki pants each morning, ordering the same coffee at the local cafe and greeting everyone with the phrase, “Don’t have a good day. Have a GREAT day.” Walking to work through a high-rise corridor, he’s oblivious to the falling buildings, cars crashes, and fusillades of bullets around him flying via the avatars of online players.
Each morning, at the bank, he greets his best friend, security guard Buddy (Lil Rel Howery) and each time the bank robber waves his gun, they hit the floor on cue, while discussing after-work plans.
PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN
Guy’s programming loop goes screwy when he meets the sunglasses-wearing Molotov Girl (Killing Eve’s Jodie Comer), a leather-clad La Femme Nikita clone, the avatar of real-life human player, Millie (also Comer). She’s a computer programmer in search of stolen AI code that has been embedded in the Free City game. Instead, she meets the boyish, mysterious Guy, and starts to fall for him.
Their attraction isn’t random. Millie’s former programming partner, now working for the game corporation, Sooname (pronounced tsunami) is Walter “Keys” McKey (Stranger Things Joe Keery), a shy coder who didn’t have the nerve to tell Millie he loved her but programmed his attraction into Guy’s character. Along with his programming partner, Mouser (Utkarsh Ambudkar) they too, enter the game as cops in pursuit of “Blue Shirt” guy.
As Guy begins interacting with the avatars of the human players, known as “the sunglasses people,” he begins thwarting other players’ violent plans, raising his point score with non-violent missions and emerging as a global folk hero, and the Free City game developers are determined to shut him down. Sooname’s president, Antwan, is played by director/writer/actor Taika Waititi (Jo Jo Rabbit) is an over-the-top speed-talking parody of a Silicon Valley sociopathic megalomaniac. He plans to release a sequel, Free City 2, that will not only wipe out the existing character set but betray legions of fans while wiping out Guy’s newly sentient existence.
Intermittently witty, technically impressive, Free Guy sheds points in its second half, with pandering (Star Wars and Captain American references) and a series of numbing narrative loops, celebrating originality while practicing the opposite. And all of this with the usual alibi that none of this is meant to be serious.
Free Guy. Directed by Shawn Levy. Written by Matt Lieberman and Zak Penn. Starring Ryan Reynolds, Jodie Comer, Taika Waititi, Joe Keery, LeiRei Howery and Utkarsh Ambudkar. In theatres from August 12.