"Free Guy" Movie Review - A Modern Truman Show Starring Ryan Reynolds as a Video Game NPC
A competent summer blockbuster, to the ideological basis of which there are big questions.
A guy named Guy (Ryan Reynolds as Ryan Reynolds) is a simple NPC in the Free City multiplayer action game (an obvious allusion to GTA V, but for some reason with interfaces from a cheap mobile craft), a bank employee who is robbed ten times a day greedy players. He has long been accustomed to his life: he orders standard coffee in the morning, communicates with standard phrases, and receives a standard sneaker in the face from another user. He does not yet know that his world is fake, and is happy to be in the dark. Until, of course, he meets a girl with the nickname Molotov Girl, she is Millie (Jodie Comer), and something does not click in his artificial mind. The guy leaves the path destined by the algorithm and starts, just like real players, to gain “levels”, but not with robberies and shootouts, but with good deeds.
Millie has a different problem - she plays Free City not for the sake of dopamine, but to find the remnants of the source code in it. The fact is that the owner of the game, the charismatic bastard Antwan (Taika Waititi), once bought out their indie project from Millie and her friend-co-author Case (Joe Keery), changed Case to work for himself and, possibly, illegally used the achievements of the guys for his mindless money-sucking shooter. If the girl manages to prove that he really remade their game in Free City, she will be able to sue the corporation and return the copyright to herself. There is only one problem: in a couple of days, Antwan will close Free City for the sake of a sequel, and the source code will disappear forever - and with it the Guy who has regained his mind.
From the point of view of the concept, "Free Guy" is the most curious action of this summer (and maybe even of the year in general): a blockbuster with the prefix meta-, which absorbed the ideas of other stories about fake worlds and real feelings. From The Truman Show - an existential drama of a man who has realized the artificiality of his own life; from "Character" - an acute conflict between the Hero and the Author; from Lego. Filma, finally, all sorts of jokes and postmodern flirtations with pop culture. Of the relatively new, there is mainly a strong emphasis on the real context, the same subplot with indie developers forced to fight with a cannibalistic corporation for the right to free creativity. There was something like this in Truman, and even in Lego. The Movie, but "Free Guy" is distinguished, perhaps, by a desperate non-metaphorical statement: such a situation, when a soulless big studio criminally uses the success of a small team, is too easy to imagine in real life. This is a blockbuster that makes fun of the very culture of blockbusters, a simple, but painfully relevant movie about how the industry's eternal pursuit of money deprives art of everything creative and new. Sounds great, no issues. But not when a movie with such rhetoric is released by Disney - the real embodiment of all the evil against which the characters of the "Free Guy" are fighting.
That is, a literally multibillion-dollar studio, which in recent years has hardly made a big movie outside of well-known franchises or remakes of animated classics, teaches us that free creativity, it turns out, must be protected. And creating safe sequels of once successful projects for the sake of profit and absorbing small creative teams is very, very bad. The latter is especially ironic when you consider that "Free Guy" was actually originally a 20th Century Fox film that got to Disney after they bought out a competitor with giblets (Fox, of course, was far from a small team, but the parallel this is not lost).
Here one could even discern some special form of self-irony, if "Free Guy" were not so inexpressive. Don't get me wrong, this is a perfectly competent summer blockbuster - sometimes funny, sometimes fascinating, it will definitely find its audience and is unlikely to piss anyone off. But for a film that votes with both hands for creative freedom and a break from industry conventions, it's too conventional. Again, all the important dramatic twists and turns, such as internal changes in the hero or changes in his motivation, are explained aloud in the dialogues (and this is in an action movie, which should actually be about action), again we are offered to watch an emasculated studio tentpole without any hint of the original Vision: There is neither the expressiveness of "Ready Player One" nor the charming tomfoolery of "Spy Kids 3D". In general, it’s funny, given the theme of the "Free Guy" and his loud recitations on the importance of Authorship, that the film itself was directed by Shawn Levy - not a bad director at all, but as devoid of any recognizable handwriting as possible. A person whose films look like they were made by a collective mind or a talented neural network.
In other words, the complete opposite of "Author", the perfect studio scripter, apparently, who also knows nothing about video games, except for the faces of famous streamers like Ninja and dancing from Fortnite (and at some point he was set to shoot "Uncharted", that's gone). Therefore, "Free Guy" does not work very interestingly with its setting, trying to quickly move from the private (that is, irony over game conventions) to truisms on the theme of love, friendship and self-realization. Recall the same "Character" - so there the hero, who realized himself as the hero of the novel, understood his situation together with a professor of literature, and at one moment faced a dilemma: die for the sake of an incomparably beautiful ending or continue to eke out a gray existence? In "Nirvana" in 1997, "Free Guy" of the game, after gaining consciousness, asked his creator to destroy him, tired of constant death and rebirth. In "Free Guy", the unique specificity of a video game as an art is comprehended very superficially - yes, there people shoot without any reflection at the dead, everything is loud and bright, and also all gamers actually live with their mothers and generally terrible racists, sexists and homophobes. Almost the only curious find in this path is the character Dude, who is released into the virtual world with unfinished scripts, and therefore he literally says “Catch phrase” instead of a catchphrase.
"Free Guy" is generally a movie of great controversy or, alternatively, even greater Hollywood hypocrisy. A loud and never-shut-up blockbuster that criticizes Free City and opposes it as "real" art to the quiet game of Case and Millie, where you just had to sit, do nothing and watch the life of the NPC (the film itself should do it, really, why is not very interesting). "Free Guy" here is a man who has radically stepped out of his comfort zone; but for some reason Ryan Reynolds plays him - an actor who has not been out of this very comfort zone for several years, and this is with his dramatic potential. The picture criticizes the thoughtless exploitation of old ideas of others - and she gives the character in the hands of Captain America's shield and a lightsaber for a couple of seconds of fan service. All of this works only if you present "Free Guy" as a brazen act of in-studio sabotage, a post-ronic faceless blockbuster about the dangers of faceless blockbusters, which, by its example, shows why the industry so badly needs new ideas and people.
This article was sponsored by Murat Yanbul
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