Ryan Reynolds has been on a roll recently, developing his own personal brand of authentic, irreverent and weirdly heartfelt comedy. Free Guy seems like a natural extension of the Reynolds-verse, taking the video game genre and flipping it on its premise. What if video games were not about the players, but about the non-playing characters?

Reynolds plays Guy, a NPC that works as a bank teller alongside Lil Rel’s Buddy, his security guard… buddy. This is all within the video game universe of Free City where players can take on Grand Theft Auto-style missions and where collateral damage is part of the fun. Within the real world, Millie and Keys are creators of Free Life, an AI game where players merely observe and interact with NPCs who evolve almost like real people over the duration of their existence. They suspect the build for Free Life was stolen by Taika’s Antwan, the owner of Soonami Games, Free City’s publisher, and must embark on a mission to prove the misdeed and get back their game. Naturally, Guy plays a central role in this as he abandons his passive NPC role and questions whether he too can become a “hero”.

I must admit that I enjoy movies that draw from pop culture and take a spin on the gaming hype. Free Guy reminds me of a less intense Ready Player One, with more comedy but just as much heart. Because it’s situated within the supposed present day, we even get to see current internet celebrities, including Pokimane and Ninja, and there’s even a cheeky Chris Evans/ Captain America reference. Some of the plot evolution is questionable but I was rather forgiving when the movie ending delivered a fulfilling emotional conclusion.

Thematically, there are a number of areas where Free Guy provokes the imagination. Intuitively, the topic of personal agency and individuality is well explored and I found myself asking myself throughout the movie whether the lines delivered by Guy and Buddy could be just as relevant for those of us living “routine” existences in the “real-world”. Even towards the end of the movie, a part of me wondered if Milly and Keys themselves could be AI characters in somebody else’s version of Free Life, and that reminded me of the “We’re all in a simulation” thought experiment.

The other theme was about the power of storytelling and how the best characters sometime draw from our own heartfelt pains and hopes. Skip ahead to miss the spoiler – it’s later revealed that Guy is actually coded as an AI character as a love letter from Keys to Millie, enabling the most profoundly believable character development. Sometimes, we do not have to look too far to write a good story – the plot could be right in our own circles.

All in all, I enjoyed Fee Guy a lot. It’s definitely a movie for today’s audience and a good action-comedy to escape the pandemic.

Here are my ratings for the movie:

Cinematography: 4/5

Screenwriting: 4/5

Musical Score: 4/5

Acting/ Performance: 4/5

Overall: 4/5