Free Guy
Film reviews

Review: Free Guy (2021)

Available in cinemas

I’m not quite of the generation raised on video games – movies were still the dominant medium for me growing up, with TV there in the background, too. But I imagine that the members of Generation Alpha are going to be more video game-literate than we Millennials are cine-literate, and be able to quote the best scenes from Grand Theft Auto as easily as I can quote Notorious or When Harry Met Sally.

As such, Free Guy is taking a big chance: it’s a take-down of modern video games that ends up concluding that “video games would be better if they were more like documentary movies, wouldn’t they?” I wonder how well that will go down with its target audience – or will it just go over their heads? Or am I misjudging those viewers, all raised on Fortnite, who might even agree?

Free Guy takes as its basis the likes of The Truman Show (1998), The Lego Movie (2014) and Tron to give us ordinary guy Guy (Ryan Reynolds), a bank worker who lives in Free City, a town divided between those with really, really exciting lives (the sunglasses wearers) who are always zooming around at high speed, shooting things, ignoring the law and generally having fun; and the regular people, who all seem to do the same things day after day after day, often getting killed in the process, only to be reborn again the next day. Little does he know, he’s only a character in a video game and those people in sunglasses are the players.

But one day, he spots sunglasses-wearer Jodie Comer (Killing Eve) and realises she’s The One. Inspired, he changes his narrative and follows her. Then, when he acquires a pair of sunglasses himself, he learns the true nature of the world and decides to advance up the levels of the game to win her over.

Nevertheless, he’s still only a character in a video game, a video game run by the evil Taika Waititi (Green Lantern, Jojo Rabbit). So can Guy ever truly be free?

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Jungle Cruise
Film reviews

Review: Jungle Cruise (2021)

In cinemas now and available on Disney+ Premium

Pfft. You know how you can really like someone and want them to do well, and usually they’re so reliable, you never have to doubt them – and then they do something really dumb? No? Okay, just me then… Awks.

Normally for me, though, the Rock – aka Dwayne Johnson – is one of those people. He can sing in Moana, he can star in a terrible Fast and Furious spin-off, he can act with a giant CGI gorilla and I’ll not flutter an eye lash. No matter what movie he’s in, no matter how dumb it looks, it usually turns out to be somewhere between “better than I thought it was going to be” and “totes awesome!”

And Emily Blunt is one of those people, too. True, she was almost Black Widow in the Marvel movies before a scheduling conflict meant Scarlett Johansson had to step into the breach at the last minute to take her place – I am just not ready to imagine a world where that never happened, but I can forgive Blunt for something she never actually did. Isn’t that nice of me?

But apart from that near-slip from her, I’ve been able to rely solidly on Blunt’s presence in a movie since more or less The Devil Wears Prada (2006) to know it’s going to be in the above-mentioned quality bracket.

And now we have Jungle Cruise, in which would-be explorer-cum-scientist-cum-sufragette Blunt decides to head to South America in 1916 with her closeted brother (Jack Whitehall) in order to find a slightly magical flower that could cure all known diseases, if you can believe all the old parchments, maps and wives’ tales that she’s collected. There they meet Johnson – and his rival (Paul Giamatti) – and charter him and his tourist-attraction vessel to take them down the Amazon to find the flower.

There’s a couple of obstacles for them. Naturally, there’s headhunters and cannibals. There’s also the zombie-like conquistadors who first found the flower, led by Edgar Ramírez (American Crime Story). There’s also a relative of the German Kaiser (Jess Plemons) who wants to get the flower for himself and is in hot pursuit of Blunt in a surprisingly modern submarine, aided in his quest by some helpful bees.

Yes, bees.

That’s where they lost me. Pfft.

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Boss Level
Film reviews

Review: Boss Level (2021)

Available on Amazon Prime

There have been dozens, if not hundreds of movies based on video games. Assassin’s Creed (2016), every movie directed by Uwe Boll, the entire Resident Evil franchise – there’s probably even a Tetris movie out there somewhere. But you have to look to the likes of Tron (1982), Jumani: Welcome to the Jungle (2017) or less obviously The Edge of Tomorrow (2014) to find movies that play with video game logic and tropes, rather than simply try to reproduce whatever narrative and gameplay an existing game has.

Is it coincidence therefore that we now have two movies out at the same time that do just that? In cinemas right now, there’s Free Guy (2021), in which Ryan Reynolds discovers he’s merely a character in a video game, not the living, breathing human being he thought he was.

(Hopefully, I’ll be seeing and reviewing that for you beautiful bunch of TMINE readers next week).

Free Guy is big stars, big budget and has a cinema release.

But, on Amazon Prime, we have the far cheaper Boss Level in which Frank Grillo (Captain America: Winter Soldier) enters his own personal video game Groundhog Day. He dies hundreds of times in often quite unpleasant ways without even knowing why a league of cartoonish assassins is out to murder him. Could it be something to do with his ex-girlfriend (Naomi Watts)’s hush hush science project, run by no less a ham than Mel Gibson?

What are the chances of that?

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