OVP: Free Guy (2021)

Film: Free Guy (2021)

Stars: Ryan Reynolds, Jodie Comer, Joe Keery, Lil Rel Howery, Taika Waititi (and a few cameos we'll get into below)

Director: Shawn Levy

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Visual Effects)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

All right, we are going to be playing a little bit of catchup on the blog this week, as I will be doing four movies from 2021 that I have seen recently.  2021's film output, I'll be honest, has been middling for me.  I've seen a couple of movies I just adored (The Green Knight being chief among them), but by-and-large the year has been more "ehh" than "wow."  This is personified by Free Guy, one of several films that feels like it came out years ago because it was supposed to before the pandemic.  Though it's hard to tell in 2021 what constitutes a hit, this movie feels like it was one.  It's grossed $276 million on an estimated budget of about $125 million (and is currently dominating the Chinese box office, so that number should get closer to $300 million before we're done), and even if you assume another $50-60 million for marketing, that comes down to a relatively profitable sum for 20th Century Studios (I loathe that we can't still call it Fox, and I know that this is petty but I don't care).  But after watching it, I'll be real-it might be a hit, in a time I'm cheering on any hit that comes across the plate, but it's a pretty formulaic one.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Guy (Reynolds), a non-player character who is in a game called Free City, where he doesn't realize that he's, well, a character in a video game.  He spends every day oblivious to the crime-riddled world around him, thinking it's just a normal day, until Millie (Comer), a real-world player, teams up with him & he starts to see the world for what it is.  Millie is trying to prove that Guy and the entire game was based on a prototype that she and Keys (Keery) made & sold to Antwan (Waititi), a ruthless gaming tycoon in the hipster vein Mark Cuban.  Teaming up with Guy, who comes to want more from his life than the preordained world he's always lived in, they are able to uncover Antwan's plagiarism, and create a new world where Guy can roam freely, not having to constantly live in fear.

The movie is impressive in terms of its effects, and I will say right out-the-gate that it's awesome to be in a situation where we are celebrating an original character that isn't part of a franchise.  I loved the commitment of the film to the specific video game-aesthetics employed by the picture, and Reynolds is affable & fun as this dopey lead character.  Reynolds is not a great actor (I've struggled with a lot of his past movies), but he's right in certain types of roles that trade on his genial handsomeness & awe-shucks likability, and that's the whole point of Free Guy.  Combine in clever cameos from Chris Evans, Channing Tatum, and a host of real-world gamers like Jacksepticeye & Ninja, and you have a movie that knows its audience.

That being said, the movie doesn't take off & can't just rely on Reynolds to keep it afloat.  The sound team is too much (it's immersive, but overtly loud & not just cause I saw this in iMax), distracting from what's going on on-screen (the visuals are already enough-you don't need to repeatedly underline "it's a video game!" with off-putting audios).  More of an issue is the plot, which has been done forever-this is a movie you see coming every second of the movie-there's no beat in this film, which does show some plot points as "twists" that you can't see coming a mile away.  We've done this with The Truman Show, we know the drill.

Worst of all, though, is Taika Waititi as the egomaniacal Antwan.  I'm a Waititi defender-I thought his "imaginary friend Hitler" in Jojo Rabbit was superb, a weird & risky addition to a film that could have flailed under its weight, but he made it work.  That said, this is a step too far.  Antwan doesn't read as an actual human being, and his character falls under the weight of being a total ass-does anyone believe this man is remotely sane enough to have built an empire of this size, much less held down a steady job for longer than a week?  It's a genuinely bad performance, and by-far the biggest thing holding Free Guy back from being a truly fun summer blockbuster.