Alright! Today I’m reviewing Free Guy, the newest action comedy where Ryan Reynolds plays himself - with slightly better results than Red Notice. Part Truman Show, part LEGO Movie, and part Ready Player One, Free Guy is derivative in a fun and original way.
Starring the live-action equivalent of Emmet Brickowski, Free Guy centers on an NPC (Non-playable character) who lives in a hyper-violent online video game, spending his day dealing with the daily minutiae of tanks, robberies, and explosions. However, this all changes when he falls in love with the tough-as-nails player known only as “Molotov Girl,” who’s looking for the secret code hidden inside Guy’s game.
It’s a surprisingly great movie. Like, there was definitely a way this could come off as a dime-a-dozen Fortnite knockoff in film form, a derivative and uninspired bland petri dish of a movie designed for product placement. But Free Guy is never that. It’s the live-action, PG-13 equivalent of The LEGO Movie, basically.
The first thing I’ll say about the film is how well they replicated the video game camera movements and placements. It’s something you probably don’t notice unless you’re looking for it, but it adds so much to the experience one can’t help but praise the movie for it. Some shots and the occasional third-person perspective make this the quintessential video game movie.
In general, the film is solidly made. It tells the story efficiently, is paced well, looks great, and has a bunch of hot movie stars doing hot movie star things. To boot, it’s consistently as well, although my main complaint from 30 Rock carries on through here - the duck, duck, goose of phallic jokes.
It’s like the movie wants to star a super naive and innocent character, but the amount of penis and sex jokes that occur throughout (Most of which are objectively unfunny) remind one more of a high school locker room than a comedy. It’s like the writers didn’t know how to end a scene so they were like “Sex?” “Sex.” Especially disconcerting was when the NPC dropped an f-bomb to his goldfish. It takes you out a bit.
The characterization of Guy also occasionally breaks through to Ryan Reynold’s now default Deadpool. In one of the first action beats of the movie, he point-blank shoots someone, creating a giant hole where their organs are supposed to be. His reaction to this gruesome murder is an unremorseful “He’s just sleepy.” It bordered on sinister, truth be told.
Speaking of the jokes, one giant joke was the villain Antoin. He has a few good lines here and there, but Taika Waititi’s over-the-top portrayal was too much. He was rarely funny and even more rarely taken seriously. He’s perfectly acceptable, but he wasn’t exactly working for the movie. He was just… doing his own thing.
As the jokes are hit-or-miss (And the Star Wars musical cue was a giant miss), it’s not really the humor you watch the movie for. It’s not like this is Mean Girls. What you watch the movie for is the heartfelt story that the movie is built around. I’ve spoken often about how hopeless romanticism can endear a movie like Titanic or Oblivion to me, but the cornerstone of Free Guy is literally hopeless romanticism.
I absolutely love that. The idea of always searching for “The One” and then finding that person, the whole gee-whiz cheesiness of it all, it’s appealing. Not like West Side Story though, where the romantic aspect was cliched. This was a fun take on the “I just barely met you, now I’m in love” trope.
Maybe reviewing via comparisons to other movies isn’t particularly great, but Free Guy’s premise certainly lends itself to those comparisons, but in a positive way. The combination of “It’s like this movie and this movie and this movie but with the setting from this movie!” actually works here. There’s a comparison that could be made to Jungle Cruise here - Jungle Cruise came off as a dime-a-dozen Pirates of the Caribbean/Mummy knock-off, but Free Guy is its own thing. Its own standalone thing with a refreshingly anti-franchise and anti-sequel message.
Overall, I give Free Guy an 8/10. “Derivative in a fun and original way, Free Guy is a heartfelt warning about the perils of franchising due for a sequel.”
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