Free Guy is the latest movie to try to answer the question "could you please stop playing video games?" Perhaps it's a sign of respect that movies treat video games as an experience to be replicated - like mountain climbing or being attacked by a shark - rather than merely a source of story material (you never see a movie about the experience of reading a book). But if Free Guy is any guide, probably not.
The hook with Free Guy is that our lead Guy (Ryan Reynolds) is a NPC (non player character) in a Grand Theft Auto-style world, only he becomes self-aware thanks to the power of love (take that, Skynet) and inserts himself into his dream-girls quest to uncover the dark secret at the heart of Free City. Said dream girl, Millie (Jodie Comer), is a player from the real world, the dark secret is corporate theft, he has to level up to even get her to notice him and when you spell it out like that then yeah, this movie does have a few dodgy moments around the area of personal relationships.
The plot is a bit all over the place, as Guy's journey of self-actualisation doesn't have much to do with Millie's real-world struggle to gather proof that her game design was stolen by Taika Waititi's evil corporate video game company. Fun fact: Waititi's performance here is nowhere near as enjoyable as it should be, and kinda suggests that playing a bossy aggressive loud-mouth jerk comes a little too naturally to him.
The two plots do connect at one stage where Guy helps Millie with a heist, though it's just a shoot-out scene rather than an actual heist. Considering how popular stealth missions are in video games, why this plot point - which is literally "we need to steal this item from this heavily guarded place" - didn't have them sneaking around (which movies can and do make exciting to watch!) suggests both a lack of gaming knowledge and faith in the audience.
Neither plot really stands up on its own either. Guy becomes a real-world celebrity because he levels up by doing nice things in the game, only his being a celebrity has no impact on the plot. The corporate theft angle doesn't seem to make much sense either as Millie's former partner Keys (Joe Keery) is (unhappily) working for the corporation, which is actually referred to in the movie as giving them all the legal cover they need. The broad strokes are clear, but the details don't add up.
On the up side, most of the time this manages to be an interesting car crash of a film. That’s partly because Reynolds is an actual movie star playing a clearly defined character and it’s amazing how far that can go to hold a movie together, and partly because this is a rare recent big budget release that is actually about things, even if what it has to say is often muddled or kind of unsettling.
All the male-female relationships here are either quasi-stalkerish or based on extremely unbalanced power dynamics, the plot sets out that oppressed peoples can only gain and maintain their liberty at the whim of a more powerful group, a brief comedy insertion of some Disney IP would be an amusing gag if it didn’t explicitly state that Disney IP is superior to anything created for this movie, and gamers outside of a handful of guest stars are presented solely as little kids or basement-dwelling creeps. But a lot of things explode, in-jokes abound, and Reynolds remains charming, so it basically evens out.
Strangest of all, a throwaway line or two at the end of the film suggests that the future of gaming isn’t actually controlling characters in a game world, but watching them do things on their own. So basically like… a movie?
- Anthony Morris
No comments:
Post a Comment