Written by: Matt Lieberman & Zak Penn
Starring: Ryan Reynolds, Jodie Comer, Lil Rel Howery, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Joe Keery, Taika Waititi
Rating: [2.5/5]
Films have the ability to elicit joy, fear, excitement, sadness, and a whole host of emotions intended by the filmmakers. Then there are ones that induce nothing but a sigh in their overall annoyance despite elements promising something much better. Free Guy firmly stands in this category as something with a strong concept but gets flooded out by a terrible villain and its desperate need to show off its corporate synergy.
With a popular multiplayer game named Free City, players can jump in and wreak havoc on non-player characters (NPC) like Guy (Ryan Reynolds). Suddenly, Guy begins to break away from his programming and obtain his own mind of thinking separate from the game, which complicates things for the evil CEO Antwan Hovachelik (Taika Waititi).
From the start, Free Guy seeks to provide something quite clever in telling the story of an NPC. For anyone who has played a video game, they would recognize them as the characters meant to guide the player by answering questions, providing quests to go on, or simply existing as cannon fodder for the player’s fun. These figures do not have a purpose or meaning outside of what they have been created to make a story centered on one breaking free and acknowledging its own existence within a video game a truly intriguing idea.
Therefore this feature takes us into this video game world and creates a sleek-looking environment where random nonsense happens and the NPCs just go with it because it exists as their everyday lives. This makes for some truly funny moments for these characters and within these scenes, the film well and truly works. The comedy lands and it introduces us well into this world but when we get towards the second and third act of this feature, things go off the rails, particularly when we introduce the human characters.
Taika Waititi’s Antwan Hovachelik serves as the ultimate culprit in yet another example of the disappointment of this man’s career trajectory. As expressed in reviews of his recent work, whenever I write about Waititi recently, it evokes this feeling of someone who loved an indie band before they gained notoriety and wishes they would do what made them cool from the beginning instead of “selling out.” What Waititi has been doing since his full integration into Hollywood as a big-name filmmaker has more than concerned and the performance he puts in as Antwan Hovachelik became quite painful to watch. Someone with such comedic ability putting in such a lazy and brutal performance led me to almost walk away completely from this movie if not for my conviction to give every movie I watch a full opportunity to make its case. Whatever Waititi tried doing here certainly did not fall into the positive category of this feature, that’s for sure.
Additionally, for all of the cool moments this feature delivers, a momentous battle towards the end, where this feature makes it quite evident it sits under the Disney umbrella caused an eye roll so extreme they still need to get back into position. A moment meant to make audience members excitedly yell about the references made becomes one of those moments taking you out completely of what occurs in the narrative for something set up as a glorified commercial for other Disney properties in quite the ghoulish way showing what sits at the core of this story in a negative way.
Starting out strong and descending into horrific nonsense, Free Guy makes me mourn for what this feature could have been in its exploration of these NPC characters but this feature had different ambitions in what it wanted to get from its audience. I’m sure many did enjoy what the filmmakers sought to elicit with this feature but evidently, I did not align with that perspective. The human characters left plenty to be desired and ultimately exist as yet another exercise in Ryan Reynolds playing himself yet again, which could have worked if the NPC existed as a Reynolds character in the game, but again he does not have that much self-awareness. A squandered fun concept hailed for originality while burrowing itself deep in the opposite with a tremendously fun first half and a truly disastrous second.
Films with Josh 