Last month, Space Jam: A New Legacy tried to thrill audiences by not only mixing classic animation and live action like its predecessor, but also injecting digital elements into an unengaging story that was overshadowed by a cornucopia of half-baked pop culture references about as substantial as the nutritional value of your average cinema snack.
While Free Guy certainly does not shy away from referencing the tropes of the gaming world.
Unlike Space Jam: A New Legacy, these tropes do not overshadow the story here, as Free Guy largely keeps these references as background elements to create texture and tone rather than rely on them to make the movie interesting.
As for the plot, Free Guy can easily be described as The Truman Show meeting the world of gaming, and while the story hardly leaves an earth-shattering impact on the viewer, it nonetheless has a certain degree of heart at its core that is necessary to make such a simple narrative worthwhile.
Not unlike 2019’s Pokemon Detective Pikachu, Free Guy boasts Ryan Reynolds getting away a surprising amount of his trademark snappy lewdness within the film’s family-friendly rating.
Additionally, the film also has a sufficiently well-crafted blend of live action and CGI that helps sell the ingame portion of the film, which is where we largely find ourselves.
The action is decent, with the emphasis being on zany gaming violence, but there is an unusual underlying sense of sweetness to many of the action sequences thanks to Reynolds’ Guy being a hopeless romantic disgusted by violence.
This leads to some refreshing plot elements about NPC’s, their autonomy and AI in general, which manages to stand in opposition to how NPC’s are traditionally perceived and treated, however, this is achieved without sanctimoniously lecturing the audience, which would have been all too easy to do.
It should also be noted that the choice to film the ingame elements as live action with some fantastical elements – instead of digitally stylizing them entirely a la Ready Player One – works exceedingly well ; by largely keeping the film live action, the real world and the ingame world feel more connected, and it also elevates the stakes of the interpersonal relationships between the human and digital characters.
In terms of the non-gaming characters, the film utilizes a somewhat formulaic dynamic, but the protagonists portrayed by Jodie Comer and Joe Keery and their motivations are sincere enough to allow the viewer to invest in them and their struggles.
As for the antagonist, while Taika Waititi is usually guaranteed to be entertaining, his greedy CEO douchebag character is unfortunately incredibly flat and predictable, and it is rather the overarching theme of indie game developers versus soulless corporations that makes the characters’ conflict interesting.
All in all, Free Guy easily places itself as one of the better films dealing with the world of gaming, and while not being an adaptation of a game and rather a story about gaming and AI likely is part of what makes the film work, it nonetheless shows that it is not impossible to make gaming-centric films that are fun and engaging without reinventing everything we know about either medium.
Verdict: 7 out of 10
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Produced by Ryan Reynolds, Shawn Levy,
Sarah Schechter, Greg Berlanti, Adam Kolbrenner
Story by Matt Lieberman
Screenplay by Matt Lieberman, Zak Penn
Directed by Shawn Levy
Starring Ryan Reynolds, Jodie Comer, Lil Rel Howery,
Utkarsh Ambudkar, Joe Keery, Taika Waiti
