Do we need another movie about the rat race? Well, why not? Creatives gonna create, and we can always take it or leave it.
As for Free Guy, you might just leave it.
In this one, we follow handsome but plain Guy. Good morning!, he says to his goldfish each day. What an exceptional experience!, he croons, sipping the same coffee he always orders. Ryan Reynolds’s performance here is typical: Quip after quip gives the feeling of a lively character, but a restrained delivery has us questioning if the character—or the actor—has anything else to offer. The answer is yes and no.
You see, this is no repetitive time-loop movie. Though Guy (and everyone else in his world) sticks firmly to the comfort zone, Guy chases his (apparently unique) intuition that there must be more to life. Mundane but honest banter with his security-guard office-pal (played sweetly by Lil Rel Howery) brings a certain charm to the movie.
And it’s funny, too, in large part because Guy is a stooge. Literally. He is a background character in a video game. As tanks rampage through his city and as his office is robbed he doesn’t blink an eye. This makes about two thirds of the movie a running joke—and one that often pleases. It’s a novel idea, seeing a game from the perspective of a clueless insider, and a good metaphor for our own lives sometimes.
When the jokes don’t cut it anymore, the movie tries to level up by introducing a couple of programmers involved with Guy’s universe. One works for the game’s host company; the other plays the game. Their three paths eventually cross in unexpected, cute, and dangerous ways. And this is where the movie lost me.
The programmers might have feelings for each other; the computer might be sentient; the head of the game company might be evil. Yadda yadda. Not only do parallel, drawn-out storylines fail to keep the movie fun, they refocus it away from truly interesting ideas: Guy, our thinking, feeling protagonist who dared for something greater in his life, was in true human fashion being used all along as a tool to tell a less interesting human story.
Watch Free Guy and you might find Easter eggs about intelligence, or love, or evolution. That can be nice. But those tidbits don’t make up for the logic errors in this movie’s programming.