‘Free Guy’ Hopes to Coast on Ryan Reynolds’ Charm
What do you get when you mix The Truman Show with Ready Player One, a pinch of Westworld, and a little bit of Space Jam: A New Legacy? You get the new Ryan Reynolds comedy Free Guy.
Reynolds is Guy, an NPC living in his simple loop inside the world’s largest multiplayer online game. Guy is a bank teller, and every day his bank is robbed by one of the “sunglass people”, a flamboyantly dressed and heavily armed character completing one of many available missions in this Grand-Theft-Auto-like world of violence and action. Guy and his best friend Buddy (Lil Rel Howery) cower with smiles on their faces, perfectly content to play out their roles in this simulation.
But one day, Guy meets Millie, a.k.a. Molotov Girl (Jodie Comer), a super badass player who shows him that his world isn’t quite what it seems. From there, Guy has to unravel what’s actually going on while programmers from the gaming company try to figure out how to get control of their game again.
As someone who has played The Sims for an embarrassing number of hours over the past 21 years, I found the concept really fun. What happens to video game characters when you’re not playing the game? It’s something all of us have thought about, and the first few scenes of Guy going through his loop really nail this idea. Reynolds is charismatic as always, even if you do immediately get Deadpool vibes from his narration early on.
Once Guy wakes up to the reality of his existence, the film takes on a Ready Player One vibe with video-gamey obstacles and a cutesy romance that feels a little too bland for the fun concept. At the same time in the real world, we meet the employees at the gaming company, Utkarsh Ambudkar as Mouser and Stranger Things’ Joe Keery as Keys, who work for the tyrannical Antonie (Taika Waititi really cranking it up to 11), an ego-driven boss who just wants to launch the next iteration of his flagship title. I love Waititi and I love watching him in just about anything, but this character felt incredibly one-note and I was disappointed they didn’t try to bring something more creative to the table because I have every reason to believe he could have pulled it off.
The third section is where things start to fall down for me and we get into Space Jam: A New Legacy territory. Predictable isn’t always the same as bad and even though it’s very clear where the story is going, we could still get there in a fun way. But Free Guy just kind of leans on cliches and starts to feel out of touch. They cram in cameos from a bunch of famous gamers and streamers and there’s lots of talk of algorithms and artificial intelligence, but it definitely has that Hollywood-does-a-gaming-movie vibe where it feels dated. There’s even a gamer who lives in his mom’s basement and a guy with a controller in one hand a slice of pizza in the other. It’s that old cliche of “look at these losers who play video games!” but it feels weird in a movie where you have actual gamers with larger followings and more money than some of the stars of the film. There could have been something subversive and funny in here, but it gave me a little more “how do you do, fellow kids?” than cheeky comedy with gaming at the center.
The entire film rests on Reynolds’ charm, and thankfully, he has more than enough to go around. He’s always given me ‘90s Jim Carrey vibes and at his strongest, he’s giving the type of charm we saw from Carrey in The Truman Show, but even that can’t necessarily pull the film up from mediocre territory all the time. After a while, it feels every bit like a PG-13 generic comedy attempting to court gamer kids. Free Guy would be the perfect movie for a day-and-date streaming release because expectations are not as high when we can just click a button from our couch, but making a special trip to the theater for this film? You can probably skip that mission.
