Have you ever felt for a video game character? I play a game in which the characters get jobs, and if I give a guy a thirty-second job and then make him do it all night before I logon again, I actually feel a little bad. In other words, Free Guy was made for people just like me.
Guy (Ryan Reynolds) is an NPC (non-player character) in an ultraviolent video game, something akin to Grand Theft Auto, only worse. In the game, players are rewarded by how mayhem and injury they can inflict. Guy works as a teller at a bank that gets held up at gunpoint several times a day. NPCs like Guy assume this is just life, ho hum; doesn’t everybody get robbed at gunpoint multiple times a day? Like well over 99% of NPCs, Guy doesn’t have more than a page of code to him. The fact that you can see him outside of his teller window or have him say his catchphrase: “Don’t have a good day … have a great day!” already makes him mildly special among NPCs.
And then one day, Guy snapped. He started doing things he wasn’t initially programmed to do. Wait. How is that possible? Why would an NPC go off script? What did he do? Hold up. Hold up. I’ll answer the last one, but before I do, some background: this isn’t exactly a Wreck-It Ralph situation where we the audience anthropomorphize an imagined humanity upon coded characters; this is a situation where a clearly coded character is suddenly acting beyond the bounds of what we assumed was his code, and he’s doing so within the confines of the game, like Wreck-It Ralph suddenly deciding after you dropped the quarter in that he didn’t feel like wreckin’ today.
What happened was Guy fell in love with Molotov Girl aka Millie (Jodie Comer), just a player in Free City, but
a real-live human being from real-live human being world. Guy quickly realizes that the only way he can indulge in his human sampler is by stealing a pair of glasses from a Free City player, which then allows him to see the world as players see it. Anybody else her get a They Live vibe? No? Just me? OK.
The imagination of how a video game looks to an NPC is where Free Guy shines as a film – Millie mistakes him for another player, of 
course, and is unimpressed with his level one status. However, to reach her level, Guy has to do a whole lot of mayhem … which he objects to. Millie then points out he can also score points by taking guns away from criminals and diffusing violent confrontations. Guy goes all in on power peacenik.
The joy in this film is the matter-of-factness by which Guy lives his life, and his very slow transition to the world of emotion. You mess up in Free City, you get a shotgun to the face, then you wake up in your apartment. Oh well, try again. He has desires without quite knowing why. And, adorably, he finds every video game “discovery” a life affirmation of a sort. Imagine the first time you played a video game and figuring out that when you hit the little rotating red cross symbol you got healthier – that was neat, right? Imagine not taking it for granted.
There is a real life story paralleling the Free Guy world involving Millie and Keys (Joe Keery) up against video game mogul Antwan (Taika Waititi). This story isn’t as good or as fun, and because it exists in the superseding world, Free Guy emerges as both a little schmaltzy and a little heavy-handed. That’s a shame, because this is one of the best comic premises in several years and Reynolds is expertly cast as the hero. Free Guy is a very funny film, but a full step below being a great film, which I think it had the potential to be.
A video gamer life has little regret
So little seems necessary to forget
Maybe you haven’t a clue
Or made a mistake or two
If something bites all you do is hit “Reset”
Rated PG-13, 115 Minutes
Director: Shawn Levy
Writer: Matt Lieberman, Zak Penn
Genre: What if your devotion to a video game character wasn’t fruitless?
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Video game enthusiasts
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Being among the generation that doesn’t “get” video games
