In the midst of the pandemic last summer, there were a handful of Zoom-oriented TV reunions that were meant to offer levity from lockdown tedium. One of these reunions was for “30 Rock,” a workplace sitcom starring Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin. That show routinely took the piss out of NBC and General Electric, the corporation that owned the network at the time, but this reunion had none of that irreverence. Instead, it was little more than an hour-long advertisement for Peacock, NBC’s new video streaming service, and all the content it provides. This special was transparently cynical, a remarkable slice of anti-art that was tolerable only because Fey and the others seemed to get the joke. Free Guy is like that reunion special, except with no self-awareness and seeing it costs the price of a movie ticket. It is the most depressing movie in years.
Director Shawn Levy, along with screenwriters Zak Penn and Matt Lieberman, begin with a fundamental miscalculation. Their protagonist is Guy (Ryan Reynolds), a friendly bank teller who has no idea he is a non-player character (NPC) in an online video game. He somehow develops self-awareness, and strives to save Free City, the game where he lives. From get-go, Free Guy presents a suspension of disbelief problem. Guy is little more than a programming quirk, and the script barely gives him anything representing a personality. Reynolds tries his best – his performance as Pikachu had more humanity than this one – except nothing he does or says captures our imaginations. There are many action sequences, but since we know we are effectively watching a video game, there are absolutely zero stakes and they unfold like pointless chaos. Long stretches of the film are about as fun waiting for your turn on a PlayStation.
There is a “human” subplot where programmers bicker and squabble over what happens within Free City. Millie (Jodie Comer) is brilliant designer who believes her innovative indie game is hidden within Free City because it was stolen from Antoine (Taika Waititi), who owns the parent company. Antoine is the villain in Free Guy, and he is atrociously written, a grab bag of boring clichés and catch phrases that are somehow less human than Guy. Millie’s plight is insincere because Free Guy is a Disney film, and Levy includes multiple references to that media conglomerate’s most lucrative intellectual property. At one point, Guy fights off another NPC with weapons from the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Star Wars, with music from both franchises blaring in the background. Levy must recognize how tediously this unfolds, so he relies on pattern recognition at its laziest.
There is nothing remotely funny in Free Guy – I don’t think I laughed once – so it gave me plenty of time to think about why it its conceit is such a fundamental failure. After all, movies are an illusion, an agreed upon lie where the audience cares about people and situations that are not real. We have developed sympathy for talking animals, serial killers and royalty. How is this film about a NPC any different than the countless films we have seen over the years?
The answer is in the nature of video games. With few exceptions, they cannot achieve the status of “art” since they are interactive, endlessly repeatable, and constructed to be addictive. Like the rest of Free City, Guy is generic to a fault, and maybe this premise would work if he was stuck in a game that had some modicum of creativity. That would require ingenuity seemingly beyond their creators, so they attempt to add some exigence by having actual personalities from YouTube and Twitch comment on how the story is so exciting. Their running commentary is no substitute for characters worth a damn.
Aside from the themes to Star Wars and the MCU, there is an additional musical flourish in Free Guy that is more insidious. We hear a musical phrase during the romantic subplots, mainly involving Millie and her co-creator Keys (Joe Keery). It is not original music, and indeed Disney lifted the score from Paperman, an Oscar-winning animated short from several years ago. Paperman is everything Free Guy is not: in a matter of minutes, it uses movie magic to stir our imaginations and emotions. Either Levy or some anonymous Disney executive thought they could recreate what the short achieved, so they repurpose the music and effectively steal the climax, with Comer and Keery as stand-ins. Even audiences who are unfamiliar with Paperman will not be moved because Levy stages this sub-plot with less subtlety than a Hallmark card.
This subplot does work, however, as an unintentional irony: Keys and Millie bonded over something small and pure stolen by a corporate overlord, and Levy tries to make us care about them by effectively doing the exact same thing. It might be funny if it weren’t so insulting.
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