“IPs and sequels, that’s what people want!” cries Antwan (Taika Waititi), the egotistical magnate behind the video game company Soonami, in Shawn Levy’s Free Guy. The man is responding to one of his underlings, for having the gall to suggest to him that creating an original game might be preferable to rushing out a poorly designed follow-up to Soonami’s wildly popular open-world, first-person shooter game Free City. It’s a knowing wink at the propensity of big studios like Disney, whose 20th Century Studios is the distributor of Free Guy, to maximize their bottom line by recycling IP from their vast libraries of content.
However true, that sentiment smacks of hypocrisy given that this film is itself a Frankenstein’s monster of sorts, as evinced by its litany of references to not just video games, most notably the Fortnite and Grand Theft Auto series, but also to movies, including The Matrix, They Live, Wreck-It-Ralph, and The Truman Show. Free Guy may technically be an original film, but there’s so much discernible IP sliced, diced, and baked into the final product to make its calls for artistic ingenuity feel nearly as cynical as Antwan’s own cash-grab release.
Free Guy’s most unique and amusing segments occur early on, within the in-game world of Free City, where Guy (Ryan Reynolds), a good-natured bank teller, and Buddy (Lil Rel Howery), a cowardly security guard, go about their daily routines, oblivious to the wanton violence and cruelty of their world. Blissfully unaware that they’re non-player characters, or NPCs, the two friends take comfort in the familiar pleasures of casually chatting through the bank’s steady stream of robberies or picking up a morning coffee (always with two creams, one sugar).
All the while, chaos and destruction are inflicted upon their world by the “sunglasses people,” who unbeknownst to our heroes are avatars of real-life players who actually possess free will. The slapstick action and comedy in this opening act is cleverly choreographed and rhythmically paced, with repeated gags of Buddy immediately dropping his gun and holster whenever another hold-up begins or Guy helping a store owner up every time he’s thrown through a window after being robbed. Here, the filmmakers capture both the thrilling rush of playing a violent game and the repetitive grind of being eternally stuck within one.
When Guy catches a glimpse of the beautiful Molotov Girl (Jodie Comer) walking down the street, he’s instantly snapped out of his stupor—an awakening like Neo’s in The Matrix—and veers off his once predestined course to become an active participant in the pandemonium around him. Molotov Girl, as we will soon find out, is an avatar for Millie, an indie game designer determined to find evidence within Free City that proves that Antwan stole code from a game she and her former business partner, Keys (Joe Keery), sold to Soonami. And as Mille and Keys, who presently works for Antwan, go about their sleuthing, trying to unearth signs of their long-lost utopian game within the virtual hellscape of Free City, Guy’s existential quest for meaning and purpose within the world of the game he lives in kicks into high gear.
Is A.I. unethical? At what point does artistic homage become outright theft? Those are among the questions that Free Guy raises, only for the filmmakers to quickly move on from them, as they’re mostly content to make jejune and sanctimonious pleas for non-violence that feel disingenuous after 90 minutes of gleefully wallowing in the carnage of a comically brutal game. Equally insincere is Free Guy’s championing of ingenuity, given that Guy finds himself in a fight late in the film that’s defined by the weapons and armor from various Disney IPs.
As Free Guy makes its final gesture toward a more peaceful NPC experience, you may be left wanting for some kind of real-world corollary to the virtual revolution within Free City—at least one that makes a lick of sense. The notion that the game’s characters can now do “whatever they want,” and thus choose to reject violence, is too naïve to apply to our world. And based on where Free Guy derives its entertainment value, it appears that the filmmakers are aware that most people—gamers and viewers alike—would much rather spend their time in Antwan’s hyper-violent creation than in the idyllic world conceived by Millie and Keys. In suggesting otherwise, the film is self-defeating and borders on sinister for implying that real, lasting change can only come through algorithms in fictionalized digital worlds.
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