Shawn Levy, a director best known for making empty, blandly competent Hollywood product, has just come out with a new blockbuster comedy called Free Guy. It stars Ryan Reynolds. In a total twist, it is an empty, blandly competent Hollywood product. It is also totally fine. Safe and comforting, with a handful of decent gags and some fun spectacle, it’s not the cinematic abomination that its oversaturated marketing lead a lot of people to expect.
It’s fine.
Reynolds plays the titular Guy, an NPC (non-player character) in “Free City,” a massively multiplayer Grand Theft Auto clone that seems to have been cobbled together by someone who has read about modern video games in an actual paper newspaper rather than actually played any of them.1 Guy goes through his scripted life, doing the same things day after day. Saying “hi” to his goldfish in the morning.
Saying the same things in the same “Ryan Reynolds is being funny right now voice” to the same NPCs. Going along with the same sadistic whims of the people playing the game.
Speaking of those players, Guy is freed from this pre-programmed rut when he gets his hands of a player’s sunglasses, which shows him his world as it really is: filled with quests and rotating health packs.
Yes, this movie wants to be Dipshit They Live, devoid of the bite and frothing rage.
Meanwhile, in Meatspace, game programmers Millie (Jodie Comer) and Keys (Joe Keery with his magnificent coif) are convinced that evil CEO Antwan (Taika Waititi) stole their code for “Free City” and are looking for evidence in the game.
See? Taika cosplay.
In the hands of a filmmaker like, say, Joe Dante, this premise would be a solid foundation for a subversive blockbuster — slipping in anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian ideas as grandma munches on her overpriced popcorn.2 But we don’t have Joe Dante, we have Shawn Levy, so it’s simply a blockbuster. There are interesting elements, like when Guy goes on a totally self-interested vigilante spree just so he can impress Millie (whom he has a stalkery infatuation with), but the movie doesn’t seem to know what it has on its hands and simply moves on. Thematically, Free Guy is far more interested in toothless stabs at background satire, as well as platitudes about independence, self-determination, friendship, and the power of love. It’s not that I’m opposed to those things,3 but they are the kind of inoffensive and heavy handed messages you expect from a movie like this, and Levy delivers them in rote fashion.
Saddled as it is with Ryan Reynolds’ usual mugging and an insufferable performance by Taika Waititi, who appears to be wearing a Taika Waititi costume, Free Guy is entirely watchable. When Reynolds isn’t using his schtick to shape non-jokes into joke-shaped objects, it can be pretty damn funny,4 and despite its flat cinematography it’s consistently visually entertaining. I am a simple man, so a random tank exploding in the background during a low key dialogue scene does put a smile on my face.
It’s a slight and efficient high concept science fiction comedy — the kind of motion picture designed to be watched on the back of the airplane seat in front of you and promptly forgotten. That sounds like damning with faint praise, and I guess it is, but given the quality of certain recent blockbusters I am okay with that.
Free Guy is, again… fine.
- Note, the title Free Guy is a riff on a term that kids used to use while playing games like Super Mario Bros. It’s a synonym for “extra life” or “1UP,” and I kinda doubt anyone under the age of 35 or over the age of 45 has ever heard it. So, there’s some context right there.
- I saw this movie in a theater utterly empty, other than me and one elderly couple. COVID’s a bitch, huh?
- Yes I am.
- Including a genuinely hilarious cameo.
