A brief digression before we start talking about Shawn Levy’s Free Guy in earnest: I have come to believe that it’s genuinely impossible to make a movie about modern gaming culture without reflecting its worst impulses as a medium. I suppose it’s a good thing that you don’t have to buy the last 15 minutes of these movies as downloadable content, but there’s no way on Earth that you’re not going to acknowledge streaming or IP cross-promotion unless you’re making a period piece like Computer Chess. Many of the things that people hated about something like Ready Player One (which was penned by Zak Penn, who co-wrote Free Guy along with Matt Lieberman) were simply prescient predictions as to where massively multiplayer games were heading. If you don’t want to get sued for ripping off a John Wick skin, why not just enter into deals with these corporate juggernauts and make it possible for your players to dress up as the Mandalorian or God of War‘s Kratos or whatever. This sort of “low-culture” bullshit is going to be used to fully write off this strange, strange Disney release, and I plead with you to just accept the cringe.
Free Guy, you see, is essentially They Live for 14-year-old nerds who, two or three years ago, probably spent entire afternoons learning Fortnite dances. I don’t use that comparison lightly, because John Carpenter, video-gamer-in-chief, may hunt me down if I do so, but it’s fair. It’s nowhere near as good, nor as iconic, but it’s still an intriguing proposition. On one level, you have a relatively straightforward adaptation of that general concept: A non-player character in a popular GTA-clone named Guy (Ryan Reynolds) discovers that he lives in a video game. He does so by blowing away a player character during one of the daily robberies at his bank — you can tell them apart by the fact that they wear sunglasses (see what I mean?) — and donning their eyewear, which reveals to him the hidden secrets of the world. From there, he strives to improve his world, primarily by fucking with the corporate dickheads who are preparing to gut his world in favor of its sequel. He’s helped in his task by a player (Jodie Comer), who, it turns out, is gathering information on the digital world for her own purposes in the real world. You see, a few years back, she and a partner (Joe Keery) invented this wild digital world with self-educating NPCs, and it was almost immediately bought out from them by a corporate raider (Taika Waititi). Keery’s character went to work for the company to at least make sure the fruits of his labor weren’t being misused, but Comer struck out on her own, looking to bring them down. This interaction between the two worlds is interesting, because of its surprising relevance, both in an economic sense and a techno-philosophical sense.
Of course, it is still a Ryan Reynolds movie. Reynolds’ schtick is somewhat less annoying or frustrating here, and I believe it’s because he’s a better wide-eyed naif than a sarcastic asshole. Guy’s amusingly earnest, though I wish the film had made more of the contrast between him and the player-base, who are essentially psychopathic terrorists stalking the sidewalks of his city and causing wanton destruction, and also either committed to him having a belief system (he describes the players as “gods with sunglasses”) or nothing at all. But his journey towards becoming a self-actualized badass is reasonably entertaining, especially when he starts breaking the mold of the game and trying to save NPCs, rather than maim or kill them, though he does so by bustin’ up the brains of player characters, most of whom Levy exploits for a decent comic value in his cutaways to the physical players behind the avatars, swearing at their mothers and wondering why their computer is fucking up. The action is almost wholly unsatisfying, however, because there’s really not much imagination to it, nor is it particularly “cool,” which is what I think a lot of people look for in gaming — it’s too constrained by the practicality of doing said stunts and making them follow an on-screen logic rather than go whole-hog on the kind of genuinely awesome and dumb shit that, say, a GTA Online player does every time he logs on.
Most of the gags fall flat-ish, especially when Penn and Lieberman write dialogue for Comer’s character. A scene in which Keery’s character tells her that she is partially responsible for birthing the world’s first true artificial intelligence is immediately undermined by her unrealistic descent into boy-crazy “Guy kissed me!” hysterics, which also does away with some of the goodwill the film wants to receive for its attempts at politically correct humor. Yet aspects of the script feel like Penn’s apologia for Ready Player One‘s shortcomings, especially with regards to the third act, which takes the “Gamers Rise Up” finale of that film and inverts it into an amusing pro-strike statement, where the NPCs, faced with oblivion, decide to go for some non-violent direct action to state their case to the world. There is a compelling leftist read of Free Guy, though it’s tempered, somewhat, by the notion that Guy’s world is an abject fantasy — a creation of commerce, much like the film itself, implying the notion of a better tomorrow through a fairer economic environment — and, thusly, is only possible within those dream worlds. On the other hand, it’s still interesting to see these attitudes articulated by a film released by one of the world’s biggest entertainment-oriented corporations, given that we’re only 30 years on from the era in which being branded a commie could really hurt your reputation.
Perhaps that comes with the territory, though: If you’re going to make a film about gaming, in some way you’re going to have to come into conflict that, for a lot of well-qualified and enthusiastic people, the industry isn’t a particularly good place to work in. Though Free Guy never comes close to depicting, say, workplace horrors on a scale as the ones that were outlined in California’s suit against Activision/Blizzard, it’s still pretty bad, with domineering bosses stealing IP from their lowly employees and harassing them at all levels, abusing company funds for their own enrichment, and, generally, committing the kind of fraud that even Hollywood would blanch at doing these days. I was genuinely surprised that the word “crunch” wasn’t used because it gets other aspects of the tech culture right, but I suppose that’s the kind of Inside Baseball thing that would push a light entertainment like this movie into outright agitprop territory, and god knows Shawn Levy doesn’t need Tucker Carlson stanning abusive bosses on a show next week while he’s already got stuff like the Delta panic weighing down his shoulders. But if you are going to try to sneak that message through to the geeky worker who might be watching, a venue like Free Guy might be the perfect kind of gelatin pocket to put that hard-to-swallow pill in.
Yet there’s an element of this dumb movie that struck an odd chord with me, and I’m sure it will for others, who were formerly fond of digital environments that were erased like the downtown areas of smaller-sized cities and towns to make way for generic strip-malls and larger lanes for larger cars. So much of the early internet has already been lost, and it’s worth noting just how insecure the future may be — the wrong server melts down or crashes, those CoD bros you thought you could chill with forever will disappear into the ether. Think of all the Flash animation projects, legitimate outsider art made by the untrained and irreverent, that are now lost to time, simply because Adobe didn’t want to make new versions of it. Or think of all the MMORPGs that have shut down over the years, scattering their player bases to the winds, each longing for good times they might have been able to share with one another through this virtual medium.
It’s weird that one could be nostalgic for interactions with non-physical objects or non-existent people, but it happens, and the capitalist cycle of churn-and-burn will ensure that it continues to happen. Free Guy, at least, acknowledges that these ephemeral things, sustained by technology and undone by it, have a cultural value beyond being the “content” consumed by the masses for a season or two until the profits dry up, and that is a worthwhile position for a film — an industry that has seen this issue occur again and again over the years, though in different form factors — to find common ground with another medium on.