Free Guy – movie review

I have to admit that I wasn’t looking forward to watching Free Guy. I love Ryan Reynolds and I’m and old school gamer but honestly the movie looked like a typical action/comedy filled with lame jokes and too much CGI. I am happy to write that I was completely wrong and that the movie is one of the best times I’ve had in a theater this year.

Reynolds is your average Joe with the appropriately generic name Guy, a so-called NPC or non-playable character unaware that he only exists in a video game. He’s basically an extra stuck in a movie programmed to repeat the same actions and lines again and again. Guy works at a bank and is friends with security guard Buddy. The bank gets robbed day after day be the “sunglass people” who are the players of the video game Free City.  One day Guy becomes self-aware and decides he wants to be one of the “sunglass people”. When he’s able to put sunglasses on he suddenly gains a new perspective on the world and can now participate, collecting power-ups, medical kits, weapons and more. All the while Guy is trying to meet “molotov girl”, unaware that she’s a player.

The film is a blast from start to finish with a great cast lead by the supremely likeable Reynolds. Comparisons to Groundhog Day, the Truman Show and the Lego Movie will no doubt be obvious. The film also draws heavily from Tron and the Matrix, but the film manages to take these ideas and give them a fresh new spin. The film does a great job of mixing action, comedy, romance, sci-fi and even some philosophy on the nature of reality into an utterly fun summer flick.

Zak Penn wrote the screenplay with his last credit being 2018’s Ready Player One. After the press screening my guest turns to me and says “this is what Ready Player One should’ve been”. Ready Player One may have been a bit more style than substance whereas Free Guy is just as “meta”, filled with pop-culture references and IP but combines it with some insightful comments on gaming and gaming culture.

Free Guy is the perfect kind of film you want to see on a Saturday night on the big screen with a crowd laughing and cheering. There’s a number of wonderful references at the end that will no doubt delight audiences, the kind that I don’t want to spoil but will no doubt put a smile on your face.