Monday, May 2, 2022

Free Guy (2021, PG-13)

I remember thinking the trailers for Free Guy looked like fun, and after it came out, I heard pretty uniformly good things about it, but for whatever reason, it didn’t make it onto my watch list until now. I’ve finally seen it, though, and I had a great time.

Guy lives an ordinary life. Get up every morning, put on his blue shirt, and go to work at the bank, which will inevitably robbed by at least a few of the “sunglasses people” who regularly drop into town. He’s content with that existence, until he passes a sunglasses woman humming a song that stirs something in him. He sets about pursuing his insta-dream girl, which confuses her. See, she knows something important that Guy doesn’t: this whole city is a video game, and while she’s a player, Guy is an NPC.

I’ve never been into video games, but I’ve spent enough time around gamers to know some of the basics, so I able to roll with the premise of the film, recognize the important lingo, and notice some of the bigger references (Free City is obviously from the Grand Theft Auto school of wanton violence and sexualization.) But I think people with even less video-game knowledge than me could still appreciate and enjoy this story. Both inside and outside the game, we have likable characters (along with a few highly-entertaining unlikable ones,) and the story nicely balances jokes with action and heart.

It’d be hard not to root for Guy, a wholesome dreamer who greets his crime-ridden city every day with a smile, and even though he pursues Millie pretty tenaciously, it’s with an innocence that speaks more to the changes she unwittingly initiates in him than just your standard guy-meets-girl story. And I enjoy too that his journey isn’t just about a love story. As Guy becomes more aware and autonomous within the game, he develops a desire to make Free City a better, safer place for him and his friends. Meanwhile, Millie has plenty going on outside of being the object of Guy’s fascination. Her interest in Free City goes beyond simple game play, and she has her own scores to settle in the real world.

I’ll also say that, while Millie is the only significant female character in the film, the movie takes care to include female gamers in minor roles throughout. Whether it’s in quick cuts to players (the film delights in humorously cutting between people’s self-consciously “cool” skins and the actual human beings sitting at their computers,) dialogue from coders at the company that makes the game, or commentary from streamers, girls and women are a clear part of this video game landscape.

If the film was just decent, the talented cast alone would be reason enough to see it. But since it’s actually pretty excellent, that means we also get strong material for them all to work with. At the center of the film is Ryan Reynolds, playing Guy with innocent charm and aplomb, and Jodie Comer provides a nice foil for him as the more cynical Millie. Lil Rey Howery gets in on the action as Guy’s best friend in the game, and out in the real world, we get strong performances from the always-welcome Taika Waititi, Joe Keery (Steve from Stranger Things,) and Utkarsh Ambudkar as the gaming company CEO and two of his employees investigating strange goings-on within the game.

Warnings

Violence, sexual references, and language.

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