Ryan Reynolds becomes a video-game character in the ho-hum action-comedy Free Guy.
The action-comedy Free Guy raises the question, “What would happen if a background figure in a video game became self-aware?” Alas, the query is nullified by a much more salient question: “Who cares?”
A cross between Deadpool and the 40-Year-Old Virgin, Guy (Ryan Reynolds) is a non-player character (NPC) in a video game who, along with all of the other NPCs, lives a bland and naïve existence. Each day, he gets out of bed and finds himself victimized in a vicious bank robbery. Assuming no one in the audience remembers The Truman Show, writers Zak Penn and Matt Lieberman simply slide the concept from reality television to video games and throw in some mock-amazed one-liners for Reynolds to deliver in his trademark high-pitched tone. Other stale ideas seem appropriated from Ready Player One, Wreck-It Ralph, and Groundhog Day, which by now must be one of the most ripped-off films in history. Considering what screenwriters earn, you’d think they’d at least be bothered to reach back and rip off something that hasn’t been ripped off lately.
Guy, who typically concludes his day by getting shot or blown up, but always wakes up fresh and eager each morning, discovers that he can deviate from his programming and assert his agency, first in trivial ways, then in more meaningful ones. Not very meaningful ones, though; picture the last act of Groundhog Day, except the reason for Phil’s actions is not that he wants to be a better man but to scale so many levels in a video game that he becomes a social-media sensation. Meanwhile, zooming out to the real world, the main source of conflict is (I’m not kidding) whether a video-game mogul (Taika Waititi) has paid the appropriate licensing fees to two developers (Joe Keery and Jodie Comer) who built the Free City video game in which Guy exists. The stakes of this movie couldn’t be lower if they involved haggling over the warranty on your Nespresso machine.
Not for the first time, nor the 1,0001st time, Hollywood has put the CGI cart before the emotional horse. Fellas, the object of blockbuster movies is to make us feel something (or, in rare cases, to think). Sometimes visual effects can help. But they can’t do it on their own. First the script must make us care about the characters. Free Guy pours a lot of screen time into the question of whether the digital algorithm Guy represents survives, and he is billed as the first autonomous AI creation in human history. But if he ceased to exist: so what? There’s one fewer background video-game character in the world? I think humanity will survive. The Truman Show made us feel that Truman was all of us, among existential comedies even Adam Sandler’s Click had some feeling, but Guy is just a jokey nonentity.
As for the love story in Free Guy, it’s a thin, feeble thing, involving actors who completely fail to seem hooked on each other, and so little work is put into developing it by the writers and their director, Shawn Levy (best known for Night at the Museum), that you may not even notice until the last ten minutes that it’s supposed to be the heart of the movie. Then the matter is dispatched with so little feeling that it’s as though the screenwriters thought they could get away with checking the box marked “romance” and be done with it.
What Levy and his writers are really interested in, and the reason for this movie’s existence, is assembling lots of excuses to ask the CGI guys to bring in their digital box of crayons and go nuts. People fall out of buildings only to be rescued by fanciful machines. Others get holes the size of basketballs shot through them. Worlds collapse. None of it means anything, because even if the whole Free City game disappeared forever, there’d be no emotional reverberations. Occasionally we get glimpses of the gamers themselves, eagerly playing along or at least watching the action involving Guy, and they’re miserable freaks and loners who live with their moms and masturbate into their socks. Their sad existence merely underlines how meaningless the video-game world is.
Although The Truman Show was pretty interesting in 1998, I doubt anyone saw it more than once, and a worse fate awaits Free Guy, which isn’t even interesting. I could forgive it if it were funny or exciting, but it isn’t either of these. If Free Guy has any kind of cultural endurance, I think it’ll be for a late scene that marks the first time (I think) since Disney bought Twentieth Century-Fox (now renamed Twentieth Century Studios) that the now-fully-operational entertainment Death Star has started to play with its library of trademarks the way Warner Bros. did with its intellectual property in The Lego Movie. If Twentieth (which produced this movie) morphs into being a sort of acerbic little brother giving wedgies to Disney, the next Deadpool movie should be a lot of fun.