Free Guy rewrites the game: Movie Review

Love them or hate them, rule breakers have a bad habit of keeping things interesting. That’s both the concept and the double-edged sword of Free Guy, an explosive, hyper-digital philosophical joy ride.

Here’s the (almost sci-fi) premise: Guy (Ryan Reynolds) is an NPC, or non-playable character, in a shoot ‘em up video game. One day he’s inspired to overwrite his programming, and suddenly he’s naïvely teaching the real world players making bad-guy choices in the game a lesson: in his world, the good guy wins.

How does he do it? Niceness. Acts of heroism soon inspire the real-world players to rethink their violent ways, and even leads to a breakthrough for two programmers who helped make the game in the first place.

To get the most out of Free Guy, you really will need a basic understanding of how online, multiplayer games function. If you don’t regularly play video or computer games, lots of the terminology and lingo used by the main characters won’t make sense.

But the smartest part of Matt Lieberman and Zak Penn’s script is Guy’s misunderstanding of the real-world gaming terms for their literal meaning. Both the humour and its significance as a plot device will be lost on audiences out of the loop.

In a grand surprise, the film is both the sweetest and most chaotic movie of the summer. Chaotic from the dozens of settings, characters, plot lines and whirlwind cameos, but heartfelt because a lot of the film is devoted to exploring the value of what belongs to us and the reality of what we experience.

Yes, it’s crazy to think there’s a consistent, heavy-handed philosophy lesson in the middle of a Ryan Reynolds-led summer blockbuster. It’s even stranger that most of this philosophizing comes from video game crazed teenagers examining the meaning of life on their YouTube channels.

But if you get over the strangeness of what’s on the screen, there’s a solid moral message: what good is our freedom if we don’t use it for the collective good? And in deciphering what matters, Guy’s friend Buddy (Lil Rey Howery) puts it best: “What’s more real than trying to help the people you love?”

Now here’s the biggest problem: there’s so much introspective exploration of ethics in gaming and business that the fun, action-packed world around it falters in its humour.

The tone, pace and production design are all exciting and humorous, but a large number of the jokes just aren’t funny. My opening day show was nearly at capacity, and aside from one or two giggles, the crowd was mostly silent, barely laughing once.

Relying on one-liners means most of the humour doesn’t land. There is, however, a silver lining, whereby making the cast sincere instead of funny makes them likeable and easy to cheer for. However messy the hero’s quest becomes, we want Guy to succeed.

It’s disappointing how unfunny it turned out to be, but Free Guy succeeds as a romance, adventure and sci-fi story. And while the runtime is too long, the thesis is exactly the antidote most real-world gamers could benefit from: being narcissistic doesn’t make you a winner. Empowering other people does.

Free Guy isn’t nearly as fun as it should be. Instead, it’s courageously smarter and more heartfelt than the blockbusters you’re used to. It’s worth seeing just on the merits of its creative positivity.

Free Guy

6 out of 10

Starring Ryan Reynolds, Jodie Comer, Lil Rel Howery, Joe Keery, Utkarsh Ambudkar and Taika Waititi.

Now Playing at Film.Ca Cinemas, the 5 Drive-In, Cineplex Winston Churchill and Cineplex Oakville & VIP.