Ryan Reynolds, I’m talking about you again. Going through another Melbourne-wide COVID lockdown, this movie came and went in cinemas across the country, but it seems like Disney+ has got my back. This looks like an action-packed digitised-version of The Truman Show and I can’t wait. Players ready? Let’s go!
Guy (Ryan Reynolds) wakes up every morning and fulfils the same enjoyable routine – he gets his morning coffee, and he goes to work at the bank, where will no doubt get robbed at gunpoint at some point, by those who run around his town in sunglasses. But something is missing; a girl. The perfect girl in fact, who has, among other things, ‘an obsession for feel-good diva-pop’ – that’s me, Ryan Reynolds, I’m one you’re looking for 😍 Or rather, we are looking for the same girl… Guy and his best friend Buddy (Lil Rel Howery), find it best to ignore the sunglasses-people where they can, but as Guy brushes into an eye-shaded damsel singing Mariah Carey, something awakens in Guy, where he must follow her, and he must know her. Getting his hands on a pair of sunglasses himself, Guy realises that there is digitised information all over the city, and Millie, also known as Molotovgirl (Jodie Corner), tells Guy that he should use the sunglasses to level-up and become the most powerful person he can be. Meanwhile, outside this computerised game, the real-world popularity for ‘Blue Shirt Guy’ explodes. Programmers Millie Rusk (Jodie Corner again) and Walter ‘Keys’ McKey (Joe Keery) discover that their unique code is in this game, and now have the evidence necessary to prove that Antwan Hovachelik (Taika Waititi) stole their ingenuity; they’ve basically created the most charming Skynet.
Luckily, I could watch this movie a second time because Free Guy moves so fast that I don’t think I could fully understand it the first time round. On my first viewing, I approached Free Guy with a wide-eyed optimism, and a smile as wide as Guy’s, that slowly started to flatten and turn upside down into a frown, passing the 20-minute mark. This is going to be a weird review because all my past reviews, like most reviews, are based off first impressions, but a second viewing has allowed me figure out where my initial interpretations were wrong, and gain a clearer picture as to what this movie is trying to do. I wasn’t expecting so much seriousness in Free Guy, and I wonder how most people have viewed the movie’s delivery, balancing dramatic themes among the comedic shenanigans. This review has taken me forever to write, and whilst Free Guy is definitely entertaining (and more so on my second viewing), I can still see potential fundamental flaws in Free Guy’s construction, that sway between being serious problems and living in the realm of nit-picks. It’s also important to note, that I’m not a gamer, or a twitcher, or anything like that, and where I think I probably understood more than 70% of the gaming references in Free Guy, who’s to know what I missed, but I certainly wasn’t overawed by anything. The premise alone is awesome, and not only can I see that there’s certainly room for a comedic take on The Truman Show, staging the concept inside a video game is a great place to start, and opens up a mountain of opportunities. And I think Free Guy has a lot of ideas competing with each other for time and it doesn’t take long for this movie to get complicated and contradictory, hyper-focused on maintaining its own frenetic pace. On my first viewing, I would have described Free Guy harshly as ‘desperately hollow’, and shuddered at the dismissal that it’s only ‘meant to be fun’, but on a second go, I came around the movie’s emotional track and joys a little bit more.
I don’t completely grasp how the NPCs and players see each other, in and out of the game. The movie sets up well that the real-world characters wear sunglasses, but then Molotovgirl can take her glasses off like it’s nothing, and the NPCs say things outside their programming that I’m not sure the gamers are meant to be able to hear. I didn’t understand how Keys can connect into Guy’s morning routine when there’s no playable characters around; this means Blue Shirt Guy’s morning routine is actually coded, yeah? Does this mean Free City has an internal clock, and there are times when Guy isn’t at the bank, and the game’s Bank Mission is unavailable? I first assumed Blue Shirt Guy only existed to the game’s context of the bank, and his morning routine only existed as an extension of the NPCs. Does this mean Guy’s apartment is coded, and players could break into Guy’s apartment, teabag him, and watch the NPC news, if they wanted? Maybe yes, maybe no. Admittedly, I do believe most of this is explainable now, but I don’t remember the same confusion at The Lego Movie, where we followed Chris Pratt’s Lego Man on a similar morning routine… and everything was awesome. Moreover, that train that knocked Guy into the next day disappears when Guy has glasses on, and I thought that maybe it was designed to keep the NPC characters out of the players’ lounge, but then Guy gets in later without hesitation – maybe it can be explained by saying the game now treats Guy as a player, now that he’s levelled up, but I’m not sure. All this might sound very nit-picky, but it’s integral to me believing in this world, and understanding where the separation lies between the real-world, Free City, and this unprecedented coding expansion… If I really wanted to nit-pick, I could bring up how Millie literally kisses the code out of Guy, after we’ve already established there is no kiss-button for Free City. But, she could have convinced Guy to kiss her instead, and the movie could have written away this problem in a flash.
How about the attitudes that guide this narrative –Guy abruptly busts into the evil lair riding a motorcycle and knocking-out NPCs, after we’ve just seen a montage of Guy vowing to be the good guy, thwarting damage and chaos. Sure, it looks cool, but does it make any sense? And how lonely is Millie that she’s more disappointed that the in-game character that kissed her somehow isn’t real, over, feeling relieved that the validation for her life’s work has been found? Again, on my second viewing I appreciated the emotional conundrum puzzling Millie breaking the news to Guy, but surely the primary focus still needed to be on getting the evidence and saving Free City, and not sending Guy into an existential crisis. Guy could have figured out that his world was a lie some other way; perhaps during the mission with Millie to retrieve the evidence, but whatever. Even as Guy delivers his emotional speech to the fellow NPCs about living life to the fullest, it’s just not rubbing right. It’s the words I’ve heard in movies before, but it’s empty rhetoric, because these NPCs are literally programmed to do one thing. Perhaps it literally the difference between metaphor and simile; there are those among us who live like NPCs, but they’re not actually NPCs, like these are. Then there’s the quick jab at ‘white-privilege’, when the boss of the movie is part-Māori and a prick, and the gold-digger NPC suddenly realising that maybe she doesn’t need a man at all; a bit of callousness and a giant one-eighty turn to round out your fun adventure.
It bummed me out, not gelling with this movie. Admittedly, I lit up when Guy uses Captain America’s shield, and the Chris Evans’ cameo was dope. Yet, no more than a second later we are jumping to a Star Wars reference, that felt like, ‘this is a Disney production, what else can we chuck in?’ A little too Space-Jam-two-y for me, overtly going for that quick surge of dopamine. (Plus, isn’t it common for video games to cross-pollinate with other media – like, I know Donald Faison’s silly dance from Scrubs is replicated in Fortnight. So, it’s not really that surprising that Free World would contain fancy weaponry from other places when you think about it.) Even Dude No-Shirt-Guy would have been cooler if we hadn’t already dealt with fifty other climatic problems, including the city bending to stop our heroes, the tension locating the bridge, and Free City killing all its players, including Millie. AND Dude would have been even cooler still, if we hadn’t already had a ‘roided-out Ryan-Reynolds-to-Ryan-Reynolds with Juggernaut in Deadpool 2. I just felt there were too many ideas; too much going on.
If you want to see most of these ideas done better, then watch The Truman Show, The Matrix, The Lego Movie, Ready Player One, You’ve Got Mail and Deadpool; but I guess, if you don’t have time for all that, you could slum it with the watered-down condensed generic-brand Free Guy. Sorry to spit in your bubble-gum ice-cream but the entire movie smacks of The Cat in the Hat’s Cat in the Hat’s response to the fish talking – ‘sure, he can talk, but is he saying anything? No, not really.’ Does Free Guy need to say anything? No, of course not, but it tries and it gets in the way of the good fun we are meant to be having. The best thing about Free Guy is the constant use of Mariah Carey’s ‘Fantasy’, and I’ll allow it. There is fun to be had, and it comes in spurts; Ryan Reynolds’ performance, Lil Rey Howery, and the movie’s design are fantastic. Taika Waititi is really very good too, improvising a lot of his lines I hear; I was scared of him through the screen because he makes Colin Farrell’s character from Horrible Bosses look like a dream. Free Guy contains a terrific concept, but really failed to match my optimism.
3.0
P.S. Pour one out for Alex Trebek in his final performance while watching Free Guy.
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