Spike is Back! Counter Point Review of ‘Free Guy’

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Rating: 2.0/5.0

CHICAGO – Welcome back to film reviewer Spike Walters … “Free Guy” has the sort of premise that seems to tingle with possibility. Ryan Reynolds stars as a background character in a Grand Theft Auto/Fortnite-style video game who gradually discovers the true nature of his existence. There are many different ways to go with this material, but “Free Guy” inexplicably strands Reynolds and us in a half assed romantic comedy about coders instead.

Reynolds brings just the right tone of bright eyed obliviousness to the role of mild mannered bank teller named Guy. He’s blissfully unaware of the true nature of the game around him and treats the frequent armed robberies at his place of employment as just another minor inconvenience that can be forgotten about after a few beers with his best friend, a security guard at the bank played by Lil Rel Howry. But that all changes when a beautiful badass named Molotov Girl (Jodie Comer), decked out in sunglasses and a slinky jumpsuit, steps into his world and he becomes obsessed.

Free Guy
Photo credit: Walt Disney Studios Pictures

In “Free Guy,” the sunglasses people represent the people playing the game. They’re the coolest cats around who don’t have to play by anyone else’s rules and can seemingly get away with almost anything. And unlike all his other background characters, Guy longs to know what that’s like. “The Lego Movie” and “The Truman Show” milked similar ideas and found real depth, memorable characters, and big laughs. So what happens when Reynolds’ “Guy” gets his eyes opened and sees the world for the game it really is? Depressingly little, I’m afraid.

Reynolds is his usual wisecracking self and manages a few chuckles here and there, but apart from about five minutes of montage the movie doesn’t know what to do with him. And the movie doesn’t spend much time fleshing out the world of its game either … other than a few throwaway jokes about newscasters reporting on regularly scheduled mayhem as though they were weather events. The robberies, shootings, hijackings and other feats of seeming anarchy are treated as expensive CGI background noise. The movie has one good visual joke that gets repeated so often that it quickly wears out welcome. While the much publicized “Easter Eggs” and a surprise cameo don’t produce the guffaws you might expect.

The film spends far too much time on an uninspired romantic plot involving twentysomething game creators (also Jodie Comer, and Joe Keery) who sold their world building game and code to an obnoxious tech mogul Antoine (Taika Waititi) and are sneaking into the game to prove that he used their code in a way they never intended. Antoine embodies all the worst excesses of Silicon Valley as a power mad gaming mogul … in a performance that can be charitably called over the top. He dresses in the self consciously expensive version of casual wear, and tries to show he’s always the hippest and most powerful guy in the room at any given moment. But I simply didn’t find Waititi-as-Antoine calling everyone bro and treating his employees with thoughtless disdain all that funny.

Taika Waititi, Utkarsh Ambudkar and Joe Keery in ‘Free Guy’
Photo credit: Walt Disney Studios Pictures

This all leads to a conclusion involving a chase across town, a love triangle involving avatars, humans and a video game character and Antoine taking a fire ax to a room full of servers in the film’s desperate attempt to infuse some action Into a story it never should have been telling in the first place. The capper is the sub-Hallmark hackneyed message about people finding the love of their lives sitting right beside them. This is such an overused cliche it’s hard to even write the premise without rolling your eyes at it.

“Free Guy” passes the time amiably enough, but it never gets much more than a mild chuckle instead of the belly laughs you could expect. But then what do expect from Shawn Levy, the director of all three “Night At The Museum” movies and a screenwriter of “Inspector Gadget”?

By SPIKE WALTERS Contributor HollywoodChicago.com spike@hollywoodchicago.com