Mark Reviews Movies: FREE GUY

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 12, 2021

Every day, Guy (Ryan Reynolds) does the same things: wake up, pick an outfit from a closet filled with identical ones, grab a coffee, chat with his security guard buddy named Buddy (Lil Rel Howery), and go to his job as a teller at a bank, which is robbed with some regularity. To us, it becomes pretty and quickly apparent that Guy's life of numbing routine at the start of Free Guy is far from average. Indeed, when he is hit by a speeding train and immediately wakes up in bed to start a new day again, that's essentially confirmed.

The gimmick, as it turns out, is that Guy is a non-player character (or NPC, as the movie itself explains at least twice for the uninitiated) in an open-world, always-online multiplayer video game, in which players run around Free City, doing missions (often involving armed and/or violent robberies) and collecting in-game rewards and generally causing chaos. Guy has a bit of an awakening when he falls in instant love with one of the human players (well, her avatar, at least). From there, he develops a consciousness and, more amusingly within the rules and goals of this video game world, a conscience.

At this point, which happens fairly soon in Matt Lieberman and Zak Penn's screenplay, Guy's story is more or less completed, because his existence is less as a character and more as a gag. It's a funny one, at first, since we know a bit more than he does about his existence and the world he's convinced is real. A smart movie might try to make something of Guy's progress, both in the game and as a self-aware individual—with hopes and fears and everything else that comes with intelligence.

The character is secondary or less in the priorities of Shawn Levy's movie, though. It's more concerned with showing off how self-aware it can be—making plenty of in-jokes, creating a plot that serves as a blatant commentary on the laziness and greed of the video game industry, providing a climax that hypocritically embraces (either knowingly or unintentionally) all of the things the movie has been criticizing. The movie hits its most obvious targets, but they feel frustratingly limited, considering the complete freedom of a video game world and the potential of a fake line of code learning to become a real guy.

Guy's awakening arrives when he spots a player named Millie (Jodie Comer), aka Molotov Girl in the game, singing a song that accompanies his morning routine. In the world of the game, Millie is one of the "sunglasses people," who essentially exist as superheroes in the minds of the NPCs—doing seemingly impossible things and wearing all of the clothing that none of them can afford and getting away with every crime, assault, and wanton act of destruction.

Guy is determined to talk to her, and after foiling one of the bank's commonplace robberies and stealing the thief's sunglasses, our digital hero, donning the shades, can see and interact with all of the perks of being a player. When Guy finally does talk to Millie, she won't give him the time of day, unless he levels up and helps her with a mission to steal a real-world file hidden inside the game.

That file—a gameplay clip showing a rumored secret level inside the game—is the foundation of the actual plot here. Millie independently co-developed a game with creative partner Keys (Joe Keery). The two sold their project to a bigger studio, where Keys currently works on the customer service team, and Millie suspects studio head Antoine (a hammy Taika Waititi) used her and Keys' code to create the Free City game. Proof of that, such as what's on that file, could help in a lawsuit (Whether or not that legal action would have any merit, considering they sold the game to Antoine, is best not to consider).

If the movie has a significant shortcoming (beyond the decreasing attention on Guy's journey outside of the plot and the broad humor, which mostly addresses generalities of video game mechanics and physics, within the video game world), it's in Lieberman and Penn's thinking that this plot revolving around corporate espionage should be the story's cornerstone. The real-world characters are too bland for any of it to really matter (Keys has a crush on Millie, who, other than her tough attitude and virtual skills in the game, primarily serves as an object of affection for a real guy and a fake one). It all inevitably leads to a lot of chasing, fighting, and digital spectacle, as the game world collapses around the action (giving the filmmakers some chances to indulge in the sort of pop-culture pandering that they critique through Antoine).

If it lacks any kind of real specificity in terms of its world and characters, the movie is genial (thanks in large part to Reynolds) and occasionally clever (Until the climax, Guy takes a non-violent approach to "playing" the usually violent game, which might be the movie's most subtle dig at the world of contemporary video games and, for that matter, movies). Whenever it's not bogged down by the dull plot and human characters, Free Guy clearly is having some fun—enough so that we want the movie to have more by fully embracing the freedom of its premise.

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