There were a few movies I would have gladly gone to see if not for COVID waves. My general unease wouldn’t have allowed me to enjoy the movie as much, and in the case of Free Guy, its debut came around about the time the Delta variant seemed to be picking up steam, and by the time that passed, I figured I could wait for this one to hit streaming. It looked like fun, but not enough for me to go out to see it. Likewise, I generally prefer not to pay a large sum for a movie if it’s just me watching it at home by myself. I get enough streaming services. It was bound to appear on one of them if I waited long enough.
Actually, it hit two, DIsney+ and HBO Max, this past week. I opted for Disney for this one. It just seemed more…appropriate.
Guy (Ryan Reynolds) is a bank teller in Free City, a place where the people wearing sunglasses are heroes. They pretty much do whatever they want, blowing things up, stealing cars, and the like. Guy goes to work at the bank with his best friend, security guard Buddy (Lil Rel Howery). He gets the same coffee every day, sees the same people doing the same things over and over, and when thieves come in to rob the bank, he knows he has to just drop to the floor with Buddy and wait it out. All he really wants is to find love, and he may have gotten it when he sees sunglasses-wearing Molotovgirl (Jodie Comer). She’s clearly the girl for Guy, and then he does something unheard of during a bank robbery: he manages to steal a pair of sunglasses from a robber, and putting them on shows a lot of things floating around that he can’t see without the glasses.
See, Guy is a Non-Player Character (NPC) in an open world video game. The people in the sunglasses are players. In fact, Molotovgirl is really Millie, a young programmer who had her original game bought out by a big gaming company led by the greedy, shifty fool Antwan (Taika Waititi, finding a new way to play an over-the-top CEO villain). Millie’s partner Keyes (Joe Keery) works for the company, and the two begin to realize that there’s no player behind the mysterious “Blue Shirt Guy” who is taking the world by storm. How can Guy even do anything like he is doing, gaining points and levels just by being a “good guy”? That’s the real question, and it may have something to do with some of Antwan’s shady behavior, leading to a case where Millie and Guy need to work together to prove a point and save a world.
I gotta say, this movie is a lot of fun. It helps that Reynolds is an effortlessly charming screen presence. I saw at least two movies last year where Reynolds was somehow in-universe an unlikable doofus, and something about that just doesn’t jibe with me. Here, his charisma is put to good use. Guy is an earnest, friendly fellow, naive but learning, and it isn’t impossible to see why Millie would start to fall for someone she knows is a computer program and not someone in the real world. Guy is a person (I am really trying to avoid saying “Guy is a guy…”) who seems to know many of the rules of his world, and when he finds he doesn’t, he learns new ones very quickly even if he isn’t entirely sure how the outside world works. Credit also to Comer, essentially playing two different characters. The confident strut of her video game avatar is swapped in for a more mousy and hunched-over real person. It’s not quite convincing–it is obviously the same person when a second actor could have easily played one of them–but I appreciate the effort that went into making Comer two different people, and she’s a talented enough actress that there are obvious differences between the two.
With a number of surprising cameos, more than one hidden behind an in-game mask, even as someone who isn’t much of a gamer, I could appreciate the effort made to make it look like a potentially real video game. It does ask a good sort of question: what if a background character in something like World of Warcraft or more accurately Grand Theft Auto decided to actually do his own thing? And yeah, why would they want to hurt people like themselves? While I am sure there will be some effort to make a sequel for this, I think this one works fine by itself. Then again, Reynolds is a charming enough actor that I am fine with seeing more of this particular Guy.
Grade: B+
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