Free Guy, the new film from director Shawn Levy and starring Ryan Reynolds (in theaters August 13), asks a probing question: how much culture can you take? Not culture in the snooty, old-fashioned sense of echoing art museums and stuffy opera halls. Culture as in what is actually widespread today, particularly with regard to video games and Twitch streaming and tech hustlers. Free Guy is an immersion into that world, or at least a major entertainment company’s approximation of it.
The sordidness, the grimness, that exists in the real thing—gamer society is, like all others, not without its ills—is nowhere to be seen in Levy’s film. Nor is, really, any of its more admirable texture, its inventiveness and creativity. But Free Guy is otherwise a full-bodied attempt to link up the old commerce of movies with an independently thriving, and much newer, revenue stream, one full of its own tribes and ecosystems that, to a steely eyed executive, might look quite tantalizingly like vast territory to mine.
Movies about video games—or based on them—have never been very good. The Wreck it Ralph films are somehow sweet paeans to mainstream digital culture that make it all feel niche. But otherwise, what do we have? The grimy gonzo of Bob Hoskins playing Mario the plumber? Several wan films that give Mortal Kombat’s gnarly violence a theater-friendly softening?
Maybe the trouble has been that too many movies set themselves only in the close reality of the games they’re based on, taking things too seriously and thus rendering everything silly. What if, instead, a video game movie was self-aware? What if the lead was a video game character who slowly realizes he is, in fact, a video game character and then must question his very existence? That would be an efficient way to be both in a video game and comment on the medium from the outside, a tidy little vehicle for the preferred half-earnest, half-arch analytical tone of the day. Thus, Free Guy.
On occasion, the film makes decent use of its premise. The best stretches play like a modern-day Truman Show, in which a man confronts, with horror, that his entire reality is a lie. In The Truman Show, the brutal truth was that one solitary man was the unwitting star of a television show, a commentary on fame and the nosiness of the public that presciently foretold the reality TV age. In Free Guy, the core argument is much more specific. It concerns the relentless, unthinking violence that gamers around the world happily visit upon non-playable characters (NPCs) in games like Grand Theft Auto. The film imbues just such a carelessly treated digital sap—an unassuming guy named Guy (Ryan Reynolds) amiably stuck in his little programmed loop as part of a game called Free City—with an emerging consciousness that just may be the world’s first artificial intelligence.
That a video game character could evolve into a sentient being is an interesting speculation, not dissimilar to the eerie insinuations of Westworld. But Free Guy is a big 20th Century/Disney movie (it was in development at Fox before the merger, but went into production after), and so can’t dwell on the darkness for too long, or really at all. Instead, Levy and screenwriters Matt Lieberman and Zak Penn pitch Free Guy as a broad celebration of the sunniest, most marketable facets of video game culture. Various stars of the online gaming world—personalities from YouTube and Twitch—make cameos as a Greek chorus commenting on the plot, and the film is rife with fan-service easter eggs and insidery jokes that those not in the know will just have to assume are clever.
Reynolds dutifully follows the studio mandate, playing an affable everyman with that trademark wink of his (visible even through the Deadpool mask). He is in some ways the perfect star for a movie like this, his accessible and slightly dated brand of sarcasm easily syncing up with the soft-pedal intentions of the film. Reynolds is, as he is in Deadpool, more than happy to toe the company line while appearing to transgress it.
He’s joined by Jodie Comer, as a tough customer in the game and a frustrated game designer in the real world. She serves double love interest duty, for Guy in Free City and for a flesh and blood programmer played by Joe Keery. Lil Rel Howery (always welcome) is Guy’s best friend in the game, content in his witless existence and reluctant to follow Guy down the path to enlightenment. Taika Waititi is the villain, the vain and conniving head of the company that operates Free City, and the in-the-wrong side of the movie’s halfhearted poseur suits vs. true creatives standoff.
Much of Free Guy seems deliberately, and solely, constructed to make 19-year-old kids yell “Fuck yeah!” at the screen, but I suspect that the movie is too sincere and generalized to actually earn that fanboy affection. The rules and physics within the video game portion of the film aren’t rigid enough; it’s just not all that credible that what we’re witnessing is an actual playable game. The references are corny (I think the particular gaming celebrities chosen as cameos will earn some eyerolls) and I would hope that a particularly egregious instance of Disney I.P. flexing will be greeted as nothing more than the annihilatingly cynical gesture that it is. Free Guy has moments of dizzying action and offers up some intriguing sci-fi speculation, but it is decidedly not a cool movie.