Free Guy

Shawn Levy’s high-con­cept action romp Free Guy cleaves neat­ly into two halves. One where Ryan Reynolds plays Guy, a pep­py, blue-shirt­ed bank employ­ee who dis­cov­ers he is a non-play­er char­ac­ter (NPC) in an open-world shoot­er game and there­fore his entire exis­tence is a com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed lie. And one where the team behind the video game deal with the ram­i­fi­ca­tions of a char­ac­ter gain­ing sentience.

Reynolds doesn’t devi­ate far from his reg­u­lar com­ic action hero shtick; he’s a sol­id cen­tral pres­ence, land­ing whole­some zingers, wring­ing humour out of absur­di­ty and kick­ing butt with aplomb. He’s par­tic­u­lar­ly fun when in the com­pa­ny of his best friend Bud­dy, played by the con­sis­tent­ly delight­ful Lil Rel How­ery. The most intrigu­ing parts of the film are when Guy and Bud­dy con­tem­plate what this all means, and there are some great moments that touch upon supe­ri­or satir­i­cal works such as The Tru­man Show, They Live and The Step­ford Wives.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the film gets bogged down in Guy’s romance with Molo­tov Girl (Jodie Com­er), tak­ing us out of the game and into the real world of video game design­ers and their cor­po­rate over­lords. In this world, Molo­tov Girl is Mil­lie, a dis­grun­tled pro­gram­mer who believes that she and for­mer part­ner Keys (Joe Keery) had some of their code ripped off by the game Free City, where Guy resides.

Mil­lie intends to sue but Keys now works for Free City under the tyran­ny of Antwan (Tai­ka Wait­i­ti), its eccen­tric CEO. How any­one thought an audi­ence would be invest­ed in stakes that low when Guy is tear­ing down the walls of his real­i­ty, get­ting in grav­i­ty-defy­ing alter­ca­tions and ques­tion­ing the mean­ing of life, is a mystery.

The laboured expla­na­tion of both the law­suit and the effect of Guy’s sen­tience on the real world nev­er makes much sense, and by the final act the con­se­quences allud­ed to ear­li­er have all but dis­ap­peared. Par­tic­u­lar­ly egre­gious is Waititi’s excru­ci­at­ing per­for­mance – hav­ing seem­ing­ly hit rock bot­tom with his recent appear­ance in The Sui­cide Squad, it’s impres­sive how quick­ly he was able to dig deeper.

The film doesn’t quite break the two-hour mark but sure feels like it does, every attempt to give Guy’s jour­ney broad­er sig­nif­i­cance deflat­ing the high-octane antics hap­pen­ing with­in the game. Even more frus­trat­ing­ly, not enough time is giv­en to the game char­ac­ters to explore the exis­ten­tial ram­i­fi­ca­tions of their awak­en­ing, or what kind of world arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, giv­en agency and lim­it­less resources, would build for itself.

In the end, Free Guy feels like a missed oppor­tu­ni­ty for Reynolds to show off his full range, and for direc­tor Levy to do some­thing orig­i­nal and bold with­in a self-con­tained uni­verse. Hope­ful­ly it will at least serve as a proof of con­cept for a Ryan Reynolds-Lil Rel How­ery bud­dy cop out­ing which, on this evi­dence, would be huge fun.