Free Guy – Not your average superhero movie
“Free Guy” is an intelligently programmed wedding of star Ryan Reynolds and subject matter, in a silly movie, handsome-looking and a great deal of fun, in roughly converse proportion to how much one sweats the details. Traveling inside videogames doesn’t always end well cinematically, but this “Guy” risks that familiar scenario and comes out ahead.
Guy, it turns out, is a non-playable character in this videogame world, living out the same routine over and over. However, all that changes when he encounters Molotovgirl (Jodie Comer, an Emmy winner for “Killing Eve), a visitor from the outside who has entered Free City on a very specific mission who awakens reactions in Guy that bring him very close to tilt.
What’s happening here? Getting into that too deeply would spoil the fun, but suffice it to say the avatars in the game world don’t bear much resemblance to their real-world counterparts, and that Comer’s outside-the-game self, Millie, is at odds with the head of the videogame company (Taika Waititi, amusingly over the top) behind Free City, setting up a threat to Guy’s world just as he’s rediscovering his place in it.
Directed by Shawn Levy (“Night at the Museum”) from a script by Matt Lieberman and Zak Penn (who, yes, wrote “Ready Player One”), “Free Guy” offers plenty of game-specific gags — as well as a dollop of “Tron” in Millie’s quest — but one needn’t be immersed in that sphere to appreciate the movie. That’s in part because the film exhibits an equally strong grasp of pop culture in general, including several cameos, one of which is so good as to practically be worth the price of admission all by itself.
For Reynolds, who has perfected the smart-alecky demeanor of “Deadpool” to the point of almost being shackled by it, Guy represents a rather deft expansion — a character that capitalizes on his leading-man qualities while wrapping him in an innocent, almost-childlike package, since so much of all this is utterly new and foreign to him, which proves oddly endearing.
Perhaps inevitably, “Free Guy” seeks to run up the entertainment score and would have benefited from saying “Game over” a little sooner, but for the most part, the film moves briskly, coming to a satisfying conclusion after the protracted chaos leading up to it.
It took almost two whole years for Free Guy to hit the theaters but Dude it was worth it! This is one heck of a fun movie for everyone, especially those in the world who game or use to game. Finally Hollywood delivers an original idea, not a sequel or superhero film. Ryan Reynolds kills it of course. It’s like he was born for action comedies. Newcomer to film Jodie Comer was incredible in her dual roles. No wonder she won an Emmy for Killing Eve. Let’s not forget about the villain video game CEO Antwan played by the multi-talented Taika Waititi. He was absolutely hilarious and ruthless at the same time.
