Free Guy

Provided you’re not a video game coder and don’t mind shrugging your shoulders at daft situations, Free Guy, starring Ryan Reynolds with his deadpan comedy timing and a lot of visual effects, will be right up your alley.

Reynolds is the ‘Blue Shirt Guy’ in an online video game, ie. he’s an NPC — a non-playable character, ie. the programmed pedestrians who walk and talk in the background. But for a second, consider these pixel people alive and attuned to their environment.

As the denizens of a virtual city, they see themselves as regular people who go about their daily routines in a sort of habitual time-loop, reliving the same programmed events day in and out, without realising they’re mostly background decorations. As any layman, he looks in awe at the insanely superpowered people with glasses, who happen to be us, the video game players (the glasses distinguish players from NPCs).

People with glasses are indestructible gods in this game world, with their cool, customised avatars; in real life they’re teenagers, pre-teens, losers, geeks and gamers who treat NPCs like trash.

Free Guy is a fun, ludicrous, attention-diverting little romp whose biggest draw is Ryan Reynolds’ comedy timing, whereas The Guilty seems somewhat characterless despite the formidable Jake Gyllenhaal

One day, however, when ‘Guy’ goes to work at his bank waiting out the routine kidnapping, he falls in love with a ‘girl with glasses’ (Jodie Comer) — a player with an ulterior agenda.

Our Blue Shirt Guy revolts against the programming without knowing it: he finds out that wearing glasses (he commandeers it from a player) opens a world of options to boost one’s skills. Soon his antics make him a celebrity in our real world, as he becomes the first non-playable character who does things his way.

This ‘free-thinking’ behaviour doesn’t sit well with Antwan (Taika Waititi), the programmer and owner of Free City (that’s the name of the video game), who deems him a rogue threat that will wreck his plans to launch a sequel in the coming days.

Video game worlds with living characters cognitive of their surroundings and feelings is not a novel concept; it has been in vogue since Tron and recently Wreck-It Ralph, the anime series Sword Art Online, Log Horizon and perhaps a billion or so other anime and manga in the Isekai adventure genre.

Free Guy, which has seen its share of release delays, doesn’t indulge in novelty — and perhaps there is no need for it. It is a fun, ludicrous, attention-diverting little romp whose biggest draw is Reynold’s comedy timing, his perky, good-guy persona and some very expensive-looking visual effects.

Call it Deadpool-lite with no cuss-words. Questions about existentialism, morality and consumerism can go play in someone else’s video game-world movie.

Written by Matt Lieberman (Scoob, Addams Family) and Zak Penn (X2: X-Men United, Ready Player One) and directed by Shawn Levy (Night at the Museum, Real Steel), Free Guy streams on Disney+.

The film is rated PG-13…but then again, what else did you expect?

The Guilty

The two main disparities between the recent Jake Gyllenhaal-starrer The Guilty and the Danish language almost-Oscar-qualifier The Guilty are the approximately one minute less running time (without counting the end-credits) and a few shuffled scenes. And, if you’re nitpicky, a few cutaways out of the 911 emergency call centre.

This notch-faster remake adds Hollywood sheen to an already engaging — if obvious — claustrophobic story set entirely in a 911 call centre, where a demoted cop from the streets, imploding and clinging to any means of redemption, gets hooked on a case after receiving a desperate call from a woman who has been kidnapped by her lover.

This transliteration, with a few directorial flourishes from Antione Fuqua (Infinite, Equalizer, Training Day), is one of the simplest paycheques for Nic Pizzolatto, known for creating and writing the HBO series True Detective.

Despite a formidable one-man show by Gyllenhaal — is it really a wonder that he is one of the best actors in Hollywood today? — the film is a meek and somewhat characterless remake. The showy, paced-up tempo was something I missed in the original film, but seeing it implemented leads to a ‘meh’ moment.

To those who have not seen the original, The Guilty would appear to be a nail-biting thriller but, like any good thriller, looks can be deceiving.

Streaming on Netflix and Rated R for language, apart from Gyllenhaal, the film stars the voices of Paul Dano, Ethan Hawke, Riley Keough and Peter Sarsgaard — but it’s unlikely you’re going to know who is who

Published in Dawn, ICON, October 10th, 2021