Just a sweet sweet fantasy, baby (Unmarked Spoilers)
Guy (Ryan Reynolds) is a friendly non-player character in Free City, this multiplayer game that’s all about destruction. Every day he and his buddy, Buddy (Lil Rel Howery), sit in the background as players, distinguished by their sunglasses, hold up the bank where they work. Everything changes when Guy meets and falls for MolotovGirl (Jodie Comer), inspiring him to steal a pair of sunglasses to be able to talk to her. Once he puts them on, he can see all the missions and gear that the players can access.
In the real world, MolotovGirl is Millie (Comer), who once designed her own videogame called Life Itself alongside her longtime friend Walter “Keys” McKey (Joe Keery). Except after the company Soonami bought their game, they shelved it and stole the code for Life Itself to create Free City. As part of her lawsuit against Soonami, Millie is trying to uncover evidence of the theft within Free City itself. Keys, meanwhile, has taken a job at Soonami.
Keys mentions that he went from an MIT genius indie game designer to dealing with complaints because of “a long and pathetic story involving failed dreams, desperation, and a mountain of college debt.” He must have gotten over the last one because he lives in this gorgeous, vast apartment despite being a lowly IT grunt. Millie lives in an equally nice apartment despite how I’m not sure she even has a job anymore because we see her do nothing but play Free City. This is supposed to be the real world?
The owner of Soonami is Antwan, who’s as restrained as you’d expect a character played by Taika Waititi (NSFW) to be. Would I have him any other way? No. Am I a big fan of Waititi as both an actor and a director? Yes. Is he miscast in this movie? Yes. Every time he’s on-screen, I can’t help but think he belongs in a video game more than the video game characters do. It’s like in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (spoiler), where all the human characters turn in an understated performance, except for Christopher Lloyd as Judge Doom, only that’s meant to foreshadow the big twist. (/spoiler)
I thought I knew what to expect from Ryan Reynolds in a movie, but the performance he turns in is actually rather different. He’s usually cast as ultra-sarcastic Anti-Heroes. Guy, meanwhile, is a nice and friendly fountain of pure-heartedness. Guy is also always hesitant to take a life, and when he does, he’s visually disturbed. Unlike all the players, he levels up by doing good deeds for the people around the city. He’s also very light on sarcasm.
The film starts with a narration of Guy saying how sunglasses people can do anything they want and that he doesn’t think one of them’s “going to return that car or that nice lady.” That sounds like Deadpool-like snark on paper, but the way Guy says it makes it clear he’s doing so unironically. He only gets sarcastic twice. The first is when he’s freaking out over how he’s an NPC and suffers a breakdown.
Guy’s shaken out of his funk by Buddy, who says that even if he’s not real, this moment, him trying to help a friend, is real because he’s trying to help somebody he loves. Of course, while that is a nice message, it can’t quite make me overlook how all Buddy does is help Guy. When Guy did offer him his own sunglasses, Buddy turned them down due to being too scared. Oh, Guy, you should have had a six-minute-long fistfight (NSFW) to get your black friend to put on the glasses.
The second time Guy gets sarcastic is when he does Millie’s speech about how they can’t be together for her. Why? They belong in two different worlds, more incompatible than an MI5 agent falling in love with an international assassin. And at the end, Millie realizes that Keys had been in love with her all this time. The film cuts to black right as they’re about to kiss, probably because the moviemakers realize that the audience isn’t going to want to see them together.
The film’s plot comes off as The Truman Show meets Ready Player One, though the use of sunglasses seems like a shout-out to They Live. Its existential themes concerning the inhabitants of a city that’s not “real” also reminds me of Dark City. And the plotline of Guy inspiring the other NPCs to grow past their predetermined roles is remarkably similar to Pleasantville and, to a lesser extent Wreck-It Ralph.
It’s kind of unfortunate that I’ve seen all of those movies first, or else I probably would have liked Free Guy more than I do. I mean, it’s alright. I’ve just seen its plot and themes done better before. Of course, if you’re looking for a wholesome movie that ponders big questions, has some good jokes, and has a stellar cast, then you can do a lot worse than Free Guy.
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