‘Free Guy’ is a fun movie with some iffy video game mechanics

Free Guy is a great video game movie — if you know nothing about video games.

In the new adventure-comedy from director Shawn Levy, Ryan Reynolds stars as Guy, a non-playable character or “NPC” in the fictional open-world video game Free City. As with NPCs in real games like Grand Theft Auto or Saints Row, Free City’s artificially intelligent citizens populate a crime-ridden metropolis where players are tasked with committing dangerous and violent heists that more often than not put the NPCs in the crosshairs.

Free Guy is a great video game movie — if you know nothing about video games.

For Guy, who works as a teller at the Free City Bank, that means being subjected to brutal robberies on a more than daily basis. It’s a decent (if dystopian) premise, turned up by an almost Serenity-style twist. With weapon-wielding bandits attacking like hard-coded clockwork, Guy lives a seemingly harsh existence as a pixelated punching bag, but the cheery bank employee doesn’t mind.

That’s because Guy doesn’t actually know he’s in a video game. None of the Free City NPCs do. To them, unbridled chaos, cruelty, and crime carried out by the mysterious beings known as the “glasses people” (so called for the headsets the players’ avatars wear) is simply part of life. Wake up, go to work, probably get killed, rinse, and repeat. That’s just Free City.

Being immortal gives the people of Free City a teflon sense of optimism, that borders on Stepford Wives creepiness but keeps this romantic comedy from ever getting too grim. It’s not until Guy runs into a player with the screen name “Molotov Girl” that he even begins to seriously question his reality, and Free Guy‘s killer story and infectious dark comedy styling earnestly take off.

Some of these scenes are seriously rad.
Credit: Photo Credit: Courtesy of 20th Century Studios

Enter Millie, played by Jodie Comer. She’s a programmer formerly employed by Free City developer Soonami, who, undercover as Molotov Girl, is exploring the game with hopes of proving the studio stole some of her past work. Guy helping Millie during this high-stakes intellectual property investigation propels the action and spirit of Free Guy’s heartfelt narrative, tying her pursuit of justice to his rapidly evolving quest for sentience.

It’s a general sloppiness that gives the impression this creative team didn’t know how actual gamers would think about the world they’d made.

Journeying through unexpected twists and turns, Free Guy can feel like a sweeping adventure flick, but it’s grounded first and foremost by funny characters you actually care about. Reynolds and Comer are perfectly paired as leads, displaying intensely likable chemistry even as the Ex-Machina of it all looms large.

Additional performances by Joe Keery and Utkarsh Ambudkar as Soonami programmers are just as stellar. But it’s Taika Waititi who steals the show as outrageously douchey CEO Antooin, whose overwhelming too much-ness will somehow leave you wanting even more. (Seriously, he wears this tracksuit/denim jacket/cloak thing you simply need to see and does this voice this critic cannot in good conscience describe for you, lest it ruin the surprise.)

All told, it’s a solid movie — one that manages to be hugely entertaining without ever seeming like it’s trying too hard on to sell you on its story’s emotional merit.

However, if you’re someone who actually plays video games even semi-regularly, there are annoying quirks to Free Guy that will detract from your experience. It’s nothing as egregious as misusing gamer lingo or over-explaining a basic gaming concept. Rather, it’s a more general sloppiness that gives the impression Free Guy‘s creative team didn’t know how actual gamers would think about the world they’d made and the myriad ways they unintentionally break it.

This bit is…quite sexy.
Credit: 20th century studios

Take, for instance, those glasses the players’ avatars wear — the ones that make them the famed “glasses people.” As cross-cuts ferrying the audience between the world of the game and Millie’s home office make clear, Free City is not a virtual reality game. It’s played on a PC. And yet, every player’s avatar is required to wear a very VR-looking headset.

It doesn’t make sense as a design choice (Who honestly wants to use an avatar creator with such a bizarre eyewear constraint?), and it doesn’t logically work as a mechanic for the story. It’s the act of stealing a physical pair of these glasses that ultimately lets Guy take control of his destiny within Free City, but that’s ostensibly a status marker Guy as an NPC shouldn’t be able to interact with in the program — ever. If he “touched” them, how? And also… where?

Or consider time. As a very Groundhog Day sequence lets us know early on, whenever an NPC is killed they re-spawn at the start of the next day in their standard location. For Guy, that’s his bedroom. When he dies, it’s the next morning and he’s in his bedroom.

But how does that play out in the real world? At the end of a long day of playing, are there are just no NPCs left in Free City? Or are they re-spawning instantaneously and having their own perception of time reset? Like, if Guy dies in the morning, does Millie wait 24 hours for him to get back? Or can Guy instantly reappear, but he thinks it’s morning and Millie knows it’s actually late afternoon?

Lil Rel Howery is a treasure, who we should have seen more of in ‘Free Guy’.
Credit: 20th Century Studios

These sorts of shoddy narrative choices effect Free Guy the same way shabby mechanics impact real video games: They make getting into the flow of this world and investing in its story far more difficult, and considerably less enjoyable. As a result, Free Guy’s other flaws — Lil Rel Howery is wasted on an underdeveloped part; the PG-13 rating keeps the comedy from an edge it needs; the runtime is too long — stick out a little extra.

While Free Guy probably would have benefitted from hiring some more gaming consultants, it’s still a fun watch with lots to offer. The cast is great, the story is sweet, and some of the jokes really land. But the quest for a truly great video game movie video gamers will actually like rages on.

Free Guy is in theaters Aug. 13.