YNOT at the Movies

If you don't play video games, you probably cannot stand the loud and absurd "Free Guy" (USA/Canada/Japan 2021 | 115 min.) about a video game. The movie is full of ridiculous CGI generated violence to feed the hungry appetite from video game players, and its never-shut-up characters don't really have anything coherent or interesting to say. But if you are a video game player, this movie might be just the fantasy you have been indulging yourself in.

Similar to Bill Murray in "Groundhog Day" (1993), a banker named Guy (Ryan Reynolds) wakes up every morning at the same time to the same buzzer, says the same hello to his fish, eats the same breakfast, orders the same coffee, walks through the same streets in a war zone, and goes to the same bank which is going to be robbed with slightly different robbers each day. That's because Guy is not an actual human, soon we all learn. He is a non-player-character (NPC) generated by the artificial intelligence (AI) built into a video game called Free City, designed by gamer Millie (Jodie Comer) and Keys (Joe Keery), but now controlled by Antoine (Taika Waititi).

Guy has been dutifully behaving as an ordinary background character until he sees the kick-ass Molotov Girl (Jodie Comer), played by the real life gamer Millie. Off the game script, Guy takes his own initiative to win Molotov Girl over. This is not supposed to be happening because Guy is an NPC and should not have acted on his own toward another character in the video game. This off script behavior proves that the AI algorithm Millie and Keys buried inside the game has a breakthrough. But Antoine plans to destroy Free City and launch a sequel game for more profit. The fight to save the game and its characters begins and the line between the game and reality blurs even further.

The director Shawn Levy seems unsure of what kind of movie he wants to make. A feature length commercial for a game? Or a drama between gamer rivals? Or a preachy public service announcement to educate people that ordinary people in the background should dream big? No matter what's in his mind, it is not sensibly transferred to the screen. He obviously wants his characters to be funny, but the direction given to the actors only makes them look like cardboard puppets, anything but funny.

The scriptwriters Matt Lieberman and Zak Penn may have played video games before, but they probably know little about computer technology based on what they wrote. For example, contrary to what Keys says in the movie, computer programmers never code with 0s and 1s. It's also laughable to see Antoine chopping with an ax on a few units at a farm of servers in order to get rid of Guy in the video game that is streaming, as if Guy physically exists on a particular computer unit.

This ridiculous film is nothing but an attempt to show off a boring video game created by amateurs.

"Free Guy" opens on Friday, August 13, 2021.