Free Guy

This feel-good Disney hybrid of The Truman Show and Tron has a nice portion of enticing romance and action in the spirit of Ready Player One. It’s nicely cast and pleasantly colorful, with typically appealing cliché elements and some fine ideas. But the dramatic framework, with the characters’ motivations and reasons for doing what they do, is a bit slapdash. But it’s my problem that I want such a movie to be logically fleshed out and everything in it to make sense. (12/08/2021)

Game character Ryan Reynolds has become sentient and decided to do good, and that can have far-reaching consequences in the game. This action comedy relies on a combination of wild action, slightly wacky humor, a bunch of pop culture references, a very plucky hero and an unexpectedly positive atmosphere. It's fun to watch. (14/08/2021)

Ready Free Guy One! The surprise of the summer and Shawn Levy at his best! I tipped Free Guy at around 60% before the premiere, and I'm really happy that it turned out to be an unexpected hit that will please all the nerds, fanboys and gameboys who grew up on GTA – this target audience will be the most excited, but the rest will have fun too. Ryan Reynolds is in his best role since Deadpool and fits in really well here – I think he took his performance here up another level. The film has a likeable world and story, an interesting plot, with countless ideas and references that had me thinking, this must have been thought up by a genius. Most of the game's Easter eggs are fun (Trolls exists ?), and the Marvel references must be making the rounds in memes all over the internet by now, because they had the whole cinema laughing. Apart from the playful and awesome visuals, the excellent and clear action, the leads have great chemistry, and the romantic line is warmly delivered. By the end I was literally crying with so much emotion that I could have sunk the Titanic with my tears. And then there is the shocking final twist (there are other twists, of course, but the final one had me on all fours, almost crawling out of the cinema). I was expecting a silly and entertaining movie, but I got the full package with everything and the big screen suits it. I enjoyed the whole two hours, and Taika Waititi as the bad guy was awesome. Story 4/5, Action 5/5, Humor 4/5, Violence 0/5, Fun 5/5 Music 4/5, Visuals 5/5, Atmosphere 4/5, Suspense 4/5, Emotion 4/5. 9/10. (17/08/2021)

Free Guy is Tron: Legacy strained through the sieve of Idiocracy, but instead of satarising bullshit, it gives the illusion of freedom with an ingratiating corporate smile. Free Guy shows the absurd degradation of the ideals of cyberpunk into a mediocre tale for a generation weaned on social-media myths about the exclusivity and brilliance of every individual. The film’s messianic romance, financed by the mega-corporation Disney, which is something that William Gibson never dreamed of, performs a diversion manoeuvre in the form of a cartoonish villain, while shoving prefabricated illusions, bought-off YouTube stars and its own bling down the throats of its adolescent target audience. It is also starting to be sad how Ryan Reynolds is becoming a slave to his doggedly constructed image as a bad-boy nerd as he begins to embody the cliché of 40-somethings playing young men chasing after would-be broad-minded women in their twenties. (28/11/2021)

A pleasant relax movie. A multi-player game of GTA filmed with real people with the message that you can do whatever you want that rides on Reynolds’ crazy humor and wild action scenes. The laid-back, optimistic atmosphere isn’t what I would have expected in the world of Grand Theft Auto, but I enjoyed it. Waititi’s villain must have seemed like a really exaggerated caricature, but he delivers in style... (28/09/2021)

Finally, someone found the balls to film GTA in all its glory and put together some healthy sophisticated romance onto it with nonchalant elegance. A great portion of fun, which is a bit hurt by the dodgy visuals and uneven pace, but it is reliably compensated by a well of great directorial ideas and the traditionally fun Reynolds. (29/09/2021)

The greatest chance of success that Free Guy has is with gamers around the age of ten, ideally those who play GTA and Fortnite, and who will surely grunt with delight. Otherwise, this is, in every respect, a half-hearted action comedy starring Ryan Reynolds with solid yet forgettable action, a below-average comedy element (pop-culture references and acting cameos are no guarantee that a joke will work and the attempt at striking one-liners misses the mark), and a formulaic story slapped together from motifs that have been seen many times before with better execution. Unlike The Truman Show, Free Guy doesn't work with any satirical level or deeper idea and it looks like Ready Player One’s much poorer and less imaginative cousin in terms of content; overall, its closer to the new Jumanji, with which it shares the inconsistency and ambiguity in the rules of its own fictional world and the ambition to entertain only casually without trying to have any kind of reach. In this respect, Free Guy works as light summer action entertainment thanks to, among other things, the professional technical aspect, an endearing subject about the lives of the game’s NPC characters and a likable cast. Nevertheless, it’s rendered in a way that doesn’t even come close to fully utilizing its strong potential. The result is that wherever Free Guy wants to be fateful, complex and absolutely thrilling, it remains only half-baked, superficial and generally mediocre. (15/08/2021)

The atmosphere of Ready Player One visibly radiates from Free Guy, and even though Spielberg's film was much more playful and polished, “Guy” still has its appeal and manages to entertain, thrill, and even move a little bit during its nearly two-hour running time. The film's premise is certainly engaging and despite a few minor quibbles, I was satisfied with its execution. Like RPO, there are more than a few pop culture references and humorous innuendos, especially provided by the main character, Guy. At times the plot was so bizarre that I wondered if Taika Waititi (Antwan) had a hand in the script, while at the same time it felt like a PG-13 version of Deadpool here and there. Ryan Reynolds is a likeable guy and the hitherto virtually unknown Jodie Comer provided a great second to him. Waititi was perhaps a little too theatrical, but whatever. The point about the (un)importance of the individual and the equal chances for each of us was a bit too on the nose, but nicely delivered. (28/08/2021)

I like The Matrix comparison a lot, because it illustrates the transformation of the perception of pretty similar themes. The Matrix is about the problem of disconnection from an oppressive system, Free Guy is a film primarily about adapting to oppression and ultimately defends the artificial system. It pretends to be an anti-capitalist fable, with the antagonist, the evil businessman, ultimately being punished by the invisible hand of the market. Similarly, it pretends to be a film about the need to break free from repetitive mechanisms, but in the end it merely replaces them with other repetitive mechanisms. And no, it's not a conscious thing. It offers all this with the white-knuckled grin of a podcaster trying to sell you his Kickstarter project with artificial enthusiasm. Cyberpunk dystopia has been around for a long time, and it's pretty faithful to its predecessors. Yet they still failed to appreciate that such a reality would look not like decimated metropoles but like ubiquitous sunny franchises full of coolness and camaraderie, because they apparently didn't think to work with the powers of marketing capitalism at all. Thus, twenty years after young directors succeeded in making prescient science fiction about how humans are unable to disconnect from the system through which machines have discovered, among other things, that the human condition is defined through suffering, we are faced with a conformist blah film shot like a Starbucks commercial that tries hysterically to pretend how fresh and young it is. Except it's devotee shit from a 50-year-old director with a 45-year-old protagonist, made for the assured man-children on whom the whole system rests and whose idea of resistance is Movember and dry February. Oh, and it's 80% on Rotten Tomatoes. So shoot yourself immediately. (09/11/2021)

Since my motor skills aren't what they used to be I spend most of my days watching movies and (who knew?) playing online games. So Free Guy was just the perfect thing for me. In the game I'm currently playing the most, NPCs don't get eliminated, so I didn't have to feel guilty and could have a lot of fun watching Guy's fate. It wasn’t hard to enjoy this movie, because the writing wasn't bad at all, the cast was multicultural but the choices made sense, the dialogue wasn’t dumb, and Dude had the best unscripted lines I've ever heard. It would have deserved five stars if it hadn't been for the clumsy romance that slowed down the pace and the inspirational speeches followed by typically American "spontaneous" applause. (01/01/2022)