Free Guy (2021)
Directed by Shawn Levy
A bank teller discovers he is actually a background player in an open-world video game, and decides to become the hero of his own story. Now, in a world where there are no limits, he is determined to be the guy who saves his world his way before it's too late.
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What critics say influenced Free Guy
While its setups and theme of finding individuality might remind you of “The Truman Show,” “Pleasantville” and “Groundhog Day,” it plops them at the center of something fresh: video games.
He avoids a repeat of his snarky, look-at-me Deadpool humor and nails a new kind of sweet naivete that's not unlike that of Will Ferrell in Elf or Jim Carrey in The Truman Show .
Assuming no one in the audience remembers The Truman Show , writers Zak Penn and Matt Lieberman simply slide the concept from reality television to video games and throw in some mock-amazed one-liners for Reynolds to deliver in his trademark high-pitched tone.
Competently combining elements of The Lego Movie, The Truman Show and Groundhog Day with a Grand Theft Auto-style open world video game, Free Guy is the latest filmic vehicle to rely heavily on the shtick of star Ryan Reynolds – who also acts as producer.
Some may have already noted the similarities between Free Guy and The Truman Show, but more importantly, it reminds me of Ben Stiller’s take on The Secret Life of Walter Mitty with Guy becoming an unlikely hero, and that’s what makes Free Guy quite heart-warming on top of the multiple levels of humor.
While the film is naturally inspired by a whole host of video games and its plot tiptoes into The Truman Show and Wreck-It Ralph territory, this is a fully original beast and lord knows we don’t see those all that often during this time of the year.
Feeling equal parts Wreck-It Ralph and The Lego Movie , there’s an inspired concept at play that fully integrates the audience into a world primarily seen by people absorbed into whatever open-world online game they enjoy via console or PC.
Whether through a lack of originality or a desire to minimize the exposition in a movie whose elevated concept could’ve gotten unnecessarily complicated, the opening minutes of “Free Guy” borrow heavily from both “Deadpool” and “The Lego Movie,” as Reynolds wryly narrates the rules of his world: In “Free City,” the “sunglass people” are the heroes (represented here by a self-deprecating Channing Tatum), while everyone else are NPCs, blithely going about their “lives” in an endless, uninteresting loop (a “Groundhog Day” conceit that lifts still more DNA from other films, including last spring’s game-based action comedy “Boss Level”).
I am not a gamer but watching this reminded me of a mixture of the innocence of Emmett from The Lego Movie and the fun of the recent Jumanji reboot.
Like The Lego Movie, the existence of a real-world outside the fantasy world adds another layer that gives far more depth to Free Guy’s high concept, and it’s also one of the film’s frequent saving graces.
But the misappropriation doesn’t stop there; much of the setup is lifted directly from “The LEGO Movie,” with main character Guy’s introduction containing direct repeats of LEGO avatar Emmett’s daily routine.
The movie makes a feeble attempt to say something satirical about online gaming and something critical about the evils of capitalism, but every idea is borrowed from so many other sources (from Wreck it Ralph to The Lego Movie) that you couldn’t find a trace of originality with a microscope.
While its setups and theme of finding individuality might remind you of “The Truman Show,” “Pleasantville” and “Groundhog Day,” it plops them at the center of something fresh: video games.
Whether through a lack of originality or a desire to minimize the exposition in a movie whose elevated concept could’ve gotten unnecessarily complicated, the opening minutes of “Free Guy” borrow heavily from both “Deadpool” and “The Lego Movie,” as Reynolds wryly narrates the rules of his world: In “Free City,” the “sunglass people” are the heroes (represented here by a self-deprecating Channing Tatum), while everyone else are NPCs, blithely going about their “lives” in an endless, uninteresting loop (a “Groundhog Day” conceit that lifts still more DNA from other films, including last spring’s game-based action comedy “Boss Level”).
Competently combining elements of The Lego Movie, The Truman Show and Groundhog Day with a Grand Theft Auto-style open world video game, Free Guy is the latest filmic vehicle to rely heavily on the shtick of star Ryan Reynolds – who also acts as producer.
Whether it’s the Groundhog Day meets The Truman Show set up or a finale which is beat for beat reminiscent of the similarly derivative Ready Player One , it doesn’t try to break new ground.
While it pays homage to the likes of Groundhog Day and The Truman Show in inventive new ways, there are a few too many occasions it skips a beat and rushes into moving the story along (Guy gains sentience extremely quickly, arguably robbing Free Guy of the chance to make that and other moments land harder).
By cobbling together elements of The Truman Show, Ready Player One, Groundhog Day, and (especially) The Lego Movie, Free Guy employs a premise that’s in danger of becoming overused but has enough fun with the concept that the viewer can’t help but enjoy the ride (a least for a while).
It’s Tron for the Xbox generation with the existential questions of Total Recall and The Matrix.
Rather than developing its own personality, the film struggles to shake the clear influence of other projects like “The Matrix,” “Ready Player One,” and even “The Truman Show” while also dropping in actual gaming and pop culture references with increasing regularity.
There are a couple of moments when screenwriters Matt Lieberman and Zak Penn seem almost willing to do that—at one point, Guy becomes an inadvertent sensation within the game by scoring points by doing good deeds instead of raising hell, inspiring others to do the same and threatening the very notion of the game—but almost as quickly, they retreat from the ideas that they raise, more content to simply graft together bits taken from “The Matrix,” “The Truman Show,’ “Ready Player One,” “Tron” and any number of other films before the dopey over-the-top climax.
It helps considerably that besides enlisting a hopelessly appealing cast (led by Ryan Reynolds and Jody Comer) and meticulous direction by Shawn Levy (TV’s Stranger Things), screenwriters Matt Lieberman and Zak Penn copiously — and gleefully — crib from some of the most crowd pleasing films of all time, including Groundhog Day, The Truman Show, Tron, What About Bob? and The Matrix…not to mention Penn’s own Ready Player One and Reynolds’s own Deadpool.
It’s Ready Player One mixed with The Matrix mixed with They Live mixed with The Truman Show mixed with Wreck-It Ralph mixed with…you get the idea.
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Feeling equal parts Wreck-It Ralph and The Lego Movie , there’s an inspired concept at play that fully integrates the audience into a world primarily seen by people absorbed into whatever open-world online game they enjoy via console or PC.
The obvious points of reference are “Wreck-It Ralph” and “Ready Player One,” the two most successful films about life inside a game’s reality.
While the film is naturally inspired by a whole host of video games and its plot tiptoes into The Truman Show and Wreck-It Ralph territory, this is a fully original beast and lord knows we don’t see those all that often during this time of the year.
I’m not referring to the myriad direct film adaptations including the Resident Evil , Lara Croft or Street Fighter films, but rather such labored cinematic meta-commentaries on virtual worlds as Tron , Wreck-It Ralph and Pixels .
Other stale ideas seem appropriated from Ready Player One , Wreck-It Ralph , and Groundhog Day , which by now must be one of the most ripped-off films in history.
Ejemplos perfectos son Wreck-It Ralph , Ready Player One , Edge of Tomorrow y ahora Free Guy , el nuevo estreno de 20th Century Studios, protagonizado por Ryan Reynolds y Jodie Comer.
Thankfully, director Shawn Levy (the Night at the Museum franchise) does an excellent job delineating between the real and virtual worlds (Guy can see the difference when he puts on special glasses, much like Roddy Piper in John Carpenter’s They Live ), with the lavish special effects and production design providing the sort of immersive experience gamers crave.
When one of the daily robberies ends with him accidentally merking the robber (a real player, which the NPCs aren’t supposed to be able to attack), Guy gets his hands on the victim’s sunglasses—a pair of eyewear that allows him to see, like “Rowdy” Roddy Piper in They Live , the secret messages (and, in this case, powerups and side missions and stats) scattered across his world.
Later, an extended sequence is pulled wholesale from “They Live.”
It’s Ready Player One mixed with The Matrix mixed with They Live mixed with The Truman Show mixed with Wreck-It Ralph mixed with…you get the idea.
So long as you can choke down the word “original” after throwing chunks of Wreck-It Ralph, The Truman Show, Gamer, The Lego Movie, Tron, Ready Player One, and even John Carpenter’s They Live, into a Cuisinart and hitting “pulse.”
But the film, a zany romp that’s part Stranger than Fiction, part They Live, and maybe a little bit of The Matrix, is insanely ambitious with levels of depth unseen for the genre.
Those who toil in the netherworld, in Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” (1927), are seen en masse, trudging with leaden gait toward their appointed tasks—a slog recalled at the start of Carol Reed’s “Oliver!” (1968), as the ranks of orphans descend to their daily gruel.
When all that fails, Antwan takes a fire ax to the server room, which strikes me as one of those Hollywood conceits — like the virus in Sandra Bullock thriller “The Net” melting the screens of every computer it infects — that the filmmakers have embellished to make a thoroughly uncinematic geek concept more exciting.
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Those who toil in the netherworld, in Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” (1927), are seen en masse, trudging with leaden gait toward their appointed tasks—a slog recalled at the start of Carol Reed’s “Oliver!” (1968), as the ranks of orphans descend to their daily gruel.
He avoids a repeat of his snarky, look-at-me Deadpool humor and nails a new kind of sweet naivete that's not unlike that of Will Ferrell in Elf or Jim Carrey in The Truman Show .