Ryan Reynolds and Shawn Levy team up for a gaming comedy chock full of laughs
Guy (Ryan Reynolds) is a very happy citizen of Free City. He has a pet goldfish, a best friend, and a job as a bank teller that he enjoys. His daily routine is very routine. He wakes up, puts on his blue shirt and tie and tan khakis. Next up is a stop at the local coffee shop and then it’s off to work. In addition to normal bank transactions, the bank is routinely robbed multiple times each day.
Free City’s citizens interact with the sunglasses people, who are high-flying, violent, intense and loud. During one bank robbery, Guy and his buddy, Buddy (Lil Rel Howery) spot a sexy brunette. Guy is awestruck right away. The problem is that she’s one of the sunglasses people. Breaking the normal routine, Guy follows her only to get hit by a train.
He wakes up just fine the next morning, but his routine is totally shot. He changes his coffee order which leads to the disbelief from everyone else in the shop. Realizing that he has upset everyone, he goes back to his normal order. Later, when he spots the same woman from the bank, he challenges the bank robber, accidentally shooting him with a shotgun.
Guy puts on the sunglasses and suddenly the world is very different. There are messages and items and weapons all over the place that he had never seen before. He sees what the sunglasses people see, which visually looks a lot like Grand Theft Auto. Eventually, he tracks down the strange woman who goes by MolotovGirl (Jodie Comer). She explains how to level and tells him to do so. Guy decides he’s going to do so by only doing good deeds, which leads to a worldwide obsession with “Blue Shirt Guy.”
While all these things are going on in the game, the gaming company is scrambling to deal with the Blue Shirt Guy phenomenon. This introduces programmers Keys (Joe Keery) and Mouser (Utkarsh Ambudkar) and the arrogant CEO, Antwan (Taika Waititi.) It turns out that there’s something very special about Guy and it must get revealed before Antwan launches the game’s sequel, destroying all the existing characters and code in the process.
Free Guy has a run time of over two hours but never feels drawn out or slow. It marries a high intensity barrage of game images and a sweet boy-meets-girl story between Guy and Millie/MolotovGirl. The cast is terrific and Reynolds hams it up early on, before he turns up the emotions when he discovers his reality. The film features appearances by many gaming streamers, a hilarious scene with Channing Tatum and the kid supposedly playing him in the game. There are a couple of cameos by actors who remain masked, but savvy fans will recognize their voices.
Free Guy takes all the mayhem from Gamer and all the scope from Ready, Player One, and tells a more thorough story. It never needs the machismo of most video game movies, especially those based on first person shooters. It’s not a video game movie. It’s an action filled love story that just happens to take place in a video game. Reynolds is dynamite and the entire cast manage to keep the ridiculousness consistent while never taking away from the heart of the film. This one deserves tons of revisits due to so many visuals and blink-and-you’ll-miss-it gags.