The Dark Herald Recommends Free Guy

I thought this movie was going to be one overly long played-out joke that was completely spoiled in the trailer.

And for the first five minutes, I was right.

Then it turned into something a lot better.  I’m as surprised as anyone.

Free Guy is a Ryan Reynolds movie, starring Ryan Reynolds as Ryan Reynolds. But you already knew that from the movie poster. He only has one character but he seems to know it and plays that part well.

Guy is an NPC in a computer game called Free City, it’s a Grand Theft Auto style MMO RPG.  The NPCs go about their daily circuit of events and get robbed, or shot, or whatever by the player characters.  Guy works in a bank so he gets robbed more than usual.

You can tell the Players from the NPCs in Free City because they all wear sunglasses.  One day Guy meets a girl who knocks him out of his rut.  He is in cyber-love and wants to track her down and get to know her.  He steals sunglasses from a PC and all of sudden can see his world like the players do.

He finally has a conversation with his would-be girlfriend who tells him he needs to level up.  Which he proceeds to do but rather than be his world’s biggest criminal, becomes its only hero, foiling the criminal activity of the players.

This turns him into a viral sensation in the real world.  His would-be girlfriend turns into his real girlfriend which is slightly problematic because she is a human and she thinks he is too.  She and her partner Steve from Stranger Things originally wrote Free City to be a place where people just watched Ais interacting, (is this like the Sims?  I’ve never played the Sims and never will).  However, their dick boss Taika Waititi stole Free City and turned it into a shooter.

Guy is proof that Taika stole their code because he is the penultimate end state of it.

Girlfriend eventually convinces Guy that he is living in the Matrix (except this was so much better than Matrix Resurrections).  And that she needs his help to save his world because Free City 2 launches in a few days and it’s not backward compatible, the current Free City goes offline for good.

I was surprised by the fact that this movie wasn’t constantly preaching at me, (oh, there were a couple of SJW jokes that landed like a water balloon but it was tolerable). Guy’s development as a character was impressive, and I ended up rooting for him to win, which in the end is all I want from any movie let alone one from Current Year.  

This was a Ryan Reynolds comedy that pushed it as far as one of his comedies can go.  At the end there was a great little actor’s scene between Girlfriend and Steve from Stranger Things, nothing spoken at all, they just let gesture and expression do all the heavy lifting.

And I loved DUDE who stole the third act of the show.

It’s not a great movie but it’s certainly a good enough movie.

The Dark Herald Recommends with Confidence.