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?
Continue reading “Review: Free Guy (2021)”