Summer movies are made of this: Ryan Reynolds just a hair off of Deadpool, Jodie Comer cracking wise as a cool girl with a secret, and high-concept comedy that’s actually fun to watch. Free Guy gleefully celebrates and roasts video game culture and the corporate dominance of entertainment and art via the ambitious and surprisingly emotional story of an NPC who breaks out of his pre-coded life when he encounters his dream girl (Comer).
Free Guy presents as nothing more than a farce built on the notion of video game mechanics in the real world. As it turns out, Free Guy does have a lot of fun based on video game mechanics, but it also ventures to explore the notion of true love and weigh the question of success versus art. There’s a romantic beating heart at the center of this movie that gives it a layer of emotion that is as surprising as the prominent use of Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy.” But both are there and both make Free Guy more than meets the eye.
Reynolds essentially acts the part of extremely earnest Deadpool but the film pokes fun at itself for this and affords more than a few clever winks at the fact that Fox characters now find themselves adjacent to several too-big-to-fail franchises. The humor swings from obvious and low-brow to tongue-in-cheek, effectively delivering something for everyone but consequentially not hitting a home run for anyone. Where Free Guy does stand out is in its natural understanding of video game culture in this moment — Blue Shirt Guy *would* happen on Twitter and Twitch. People do have a cavalier attitude toward NPCs and if you run around in a sandbox game for long enough, you sure do get to know the baked-in lines of dialogue. Where Mythic Quest takes a deep dive into the people behind the games, Free Guy gets cozy with the world the games create, and the people who spend their time there.
Ultimately, Free Guy is the kind of casual popcorn movie that might have been take it or leave it before the year that was 2020, but after a long absence from theaters, it feels like the perfect snack of frivolity and easy charm. This picture doesn’t operate with ambiguity. We know who is good, who is bad and exactly what has to happen to complete the story. But Free Guy works because it doesn’t pretend otherwise. This movie is on a mission to entertain. And for just shy of two hours, it manages that.