In an interview with SFX, Ryan Reynolds described Free Guy as “a fastball of joy,” so leave your cynicism at the door. Reynolds plays Guy, a bank teller who lives in Free City. Every day he goes through the same routine of getting dressed in the same outfit, buying the same cup of coffee before work, and getting through the daily multiple bank heists. None of this stops Guy from having a sunny outlook on life however, wishing everyone not a ‘good day’ but a ‘great day.’ What Guy doesn’t realise is that his world is a video game and he is an NPC (non-playable-character), one of the many that populate the background and who seem to exist to be abused by the players (here denoted in-game by people wearing sunglasses). But then he meets a player who goes by the name of Molotov Girl…
Free Guy joins the, still small, pantheon of “good” video game films, immediately ranking up there with other recent entries like Detective Pikachu, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Ready Player One. And not since Ready Player One have I seen a film that captures gaming and gaming culture SO well (this may be the only instance of tea-bagging being genuinely amusing). Meeting Molotov Girl allows Guy to break his programmed loop (I have to admit that I am not a programmer; no doubt there are actual programmers who will watch this and say ‘that’s nonsense’, but the explanations given make enough sense and have enough internal consistency to make a layperson like me go ‘yeah I buy that’) and, in order to try and impress her, he acquires a pair of player sunglasses which, à la They Live, lifts the curtain by allowing him to see things normally only players would be able to see, such as mission options, health packs and the like. Molotov Girl is actually the avatar of Millie (both roles played by Jodie Comer), a programmer with a legal case against the publisher of Free City and its CEO Antwan (played with wonderful “hipster douchebag” energy by Taika Waititi) and is looking for evidence that he stole her code and used it to create the game. In order for Guy to help her he has to level up, and this is where the film uses video game mechanics to its storytelling advantage.
Like GTA or Fortnite, Free City is a sandbox game where the player is free to behave as well or as badly as they wish. But instead of levelling up by causing pain he does so by doing good, and his altruism captures people’s imagination, to the point where “blue shirt guy” becomes a global phenomenon. Much to Antwan’s displeasure, as he thinks that this is ruining the game. The film has several real life YouTubers and Twitch streamers playing themselves—Sean McLoughlin (AKA Jacksepticeye) for instance, a fun little bit of serendipity as some will be aware that, as part of the press for Deadpool 2, he made a video where he and Reynolds played the 2013 Deadpool video game—who end up acting as a Greek chorus, as Guy continues to learn and grow and slowly become more sentient. It’s a fun way of making us think about our online behaviour without being too glib or too preachy. Also like Ready Player One, Free Guy is chock full of Easter eggs, references, and cameos, including one that, when I went to see it, made the entire screen I was in, myself included, go nuts (and that doesn’t happen often in British cinemas).
Great complementary from the rest of the supporting cast—including Joe Keery as Millie’s coding partner Walter “Keys” McKeys and Lil Rel Howery as Guy’s best friend Buddy—help to make the experience akin to getting a shot in the arm of liquid fun, and it seems the majority agree with this assessment. The day after the film’s release, Reynolds himself announced on Twitter that Disney had greenlit a sequel (an ironical development for a film which actively pokes fun at the fact that no one makes original IP anymore and that all people seem to want—or at least what corporations seem to think they want—are franchises and sequels, which Reynolds humorously pointed out). Like he said, if they don’t call it “Albuquerque Boiled Turkey” they will have definitely missed a trick.
