Jim Gaffigan brilliantly pointed out once how fruitcake is one of our great disappointments, combining two things people love into something hideous. Video games and movies have a similar toxic relationship. Apart they can be wonderful, together, they make mostly hot garbage. You know it’s bad when the cartoonish 1995 Mortal Kombat is held up as a beacon for the heights of the genre. Yikes. Well, with that much of a crappy resume, the king of snark Ryan Reynolds found a perfect vehicle to jump over a low bar. Free Guy is easily the best video game/movie merger, probably because it is not trying to ape one genre or the other, it’s just trying to be its own thing, like blue shirt guy (Reynolds).
Blue Shirt Guy, or Guy for short, has not just a good day, but a great day everyday in Free City. He feeds his goldfish, gets his coffee, works at the bank with his best Buddy (Lil Rel Howery), where he promptly gets robbed daily by the “glasses wearers.” Free City is an online Grand Theft Auto type game created by gamer mogul Antwan (Taika Waititi), where players go in and basically destroy anything and any NPC (non playable character, for the non gamers) they run into. Guy, an NPC, abandons that routine one day when he meets Molotov Girl (Jodie Comer), a glasses wearer whom he becomes smitten with, and maybe hopes to fall in love with.
Like most of the movie/video game mergers, the behind the scenes brass isn’t exactly the best of the best: we’ve got Shawn Levy and Zak Penn, two studio backed creatives mostly really good and walking the company line and probably coming in under budget (think Night at the Museum or Real Steel: simple, fun, and stupid). However, their premise of Free Guy is really well conceived, free being the operative word. We’re free of franchising requirements and genre requirements here. Levy and Penn can let their imaginations run wild, and they do mostly in fun ways, fusing the best parts of each genre. Those video game explosions/car wrecks? They look pretty spectacular on the big screen! The movie then benefits from using video game rules in its reality, eliminating the constant need for explaining why a gun shows up when needed and creating a world of limitless possibilities. Living in both worlds harmoniously gloriously pays off in the 3rd act fight/chase, where the movie combines the best parts of video games and movies to create rock solid entertainment with a dash of everything, including a couple killer cameos.
The best part of Levy/Penn’s story is centering the movie around an NPC. This keeps Free Guy, well, free from a story revolving around video game plotting of bigger/badder bosses that can repeat themselves. Instead, we get a very Wachowski like story that goes much deeper than the trailer suggests, contemplating an artificial intelligence which starts to become self-aware and the consequences of that decision on the game’s creators. Ryan Reynolds, for his part, isn’t just a snarky Deadpool/Van Wilder mixture. He makes that blue shirt guy NPC a real character, who goes through a series of complex moral quandaries with real emotional heft. Unfortunately Levy/Penn aren’t the brilliant Wachowski’s, so the best parts of Free Guy are left underexplored in favor of a joke or explosion. But there’s enough in the movie to make me hope for a sequel only revolving around the Reynolds character that digs deeper.
Or maybe that’s just a sweet sweet fantasy baby as Jodie Comer and Reynolds like to sing. If that’s the case, at least Free Guy captures the video game movie adaptation flag from 1995 Mortal Kombat. It’s fun, solid summer entertainment. I look forward to the movie/video game sequels Free Guy hypocritically and repeatedly mocks that all studios want. Then we can get more shameless with Reynolds making Deadpool his sidekick in the next one.