There are a lot of different things I get from movies. While I tend to favor more cerebral and emotional offerings, that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for good old-fashioned popcorn entertainment. Free Guy is just that and was a lot more fun and surprisingly more fleshed out than I expected.
It felt like I had been seeing ads for this movie for a long time and that’s because it originated at 20th Century Fox in 2016 and started filming in 2019, before the Dinsey merger, making it the first movie to continue production under the newly minted 20th Century Studios banner. It finally found its place in the summer of 2021 and has had a respectable box office haul at a time where that’s not easy.
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Guy is a bank teller who’s living his best life, doing the exact same things every day until he sees a woman that changes everything. With the help of special sunglasses, he is able to see that the world around him is a game. As he begins to play that game, he begins to understand his place in the world and what’s at stake. And that game he’s playing is a literal videogame and he just happens to be a character in it.
There are some familiar rom-com elements at play, but it’s packaged well as a mix of The Truman Show, Ready Player One, and the Grand Theft Auto videogame series. There is a lot going on but, if you’re familiar with those IPs, then that’s the best way to describe it.
Director Shawn Levy (Big Fat Liar, Night at the Museum) reportedly passed on the script when he first read it in 2016 but was brought back into the loop after Hugh Jackman introduced him to Ryan Reynolds. I don’t know when in the process Zak Penn was brought, but his Ready Player One screenplay certainly helped out co-writer Matt Lieberman. The resulting story is funny and endearing, but also well-grounded in the more technical aspects of its presentation. There’s an authenticity to the story behind the game that resonated for me in a way I didn’t anticipate.
Ryan Reynolds tends to play very similar characters most of the time and those have become slightly enmeshed with his personality, but I’m not one to hop on the train of giving him shit for it. He’s got a brand, he knows exactly what that is, and he sticks with it. Reynolds has done good work in other, more serious roles. However, it doesn’t seem like that’s what his fans are clamoring for. As Guy, he gets to use his patented sarcastic humor and charm to their full effect and it’s a big part of why the movie has done well and been met with positivity.
Jodie Comer is probably most well-known for her role as Villanelle on the show Killing Eve, but that’ll change after this. There isn’t much difference between her online avatar and her real-life character, Millie, in this movie but she plays them both well. Joe Keery was particularly good as Keys, Millie’s former partner, and showed that he’s ready to step into the spotlight.
Both Lil Rel Howrey and Utkarsh Ambukdar were great additions as mostly comedy relief, but both of their characters had heart and their performances added more to the final product than just punchlines. Those were reserved mostly for Taika Waititi as the villain Antwan. He plays a surprisingly good, douchey asshole for someone who comes across as a nice guy. Reynolds also had a bunch of buddies come and do cameos, but I’ll leave those for you to discover.
Recommendation: This is the kind of movie the industry needed right now and it’s a great time if you’re looking to unplug.
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