An NPC living inside the world of a Grand Theft Auto-like video game suddenly becomes sentient in Free Guy, an unexpectedly deep new feature now playing in Prague cinemas that, like Groundhog Day before it, manages to bring some surprisingly profound spiritual themes into the conventional narrative of a Hollywood comedy.
In Free Guy, Ryan Reynolds plays Guy, a bank teller with khakis and a blue-collared shirt whose daily existence follows the same routine: wake up, say hi to the goldfish, walk to work, grab a coffee with cream and two sugars, ignore the car crashes and bullets flying by on the streets outside, and calmly lie down on the floor with security guard Buddy (Lil Rel Howery) when the bank is robbed every few minutes.
To Guy, this is normal life. But for us, it’s made clear that the bad apples shooting up Free Guy’s Free City and robbing the bank every few minutes are actually tween girls having some fun after school, and twentysomething guys living in their parents’ basement, just casually playing the game that is Guy’s world.
But while Guy is an NPC (non-playable character) going through his daily routine with the rigid structure of the characters in Grand Theft Auto V or Red Dead Redemption 2, he’s also been programmed to yearn for something more. And when he spots an avatar controlled from the “real” world by Millie (Jodie Comer), it awakens enough inside of him to start to shake things up.
By not focusing on the repetitive nature of the time loop premise – things can change from day to day in the world of Free Guy, largely based on interactions with playable characters controlled from the real world – the film manage to avoid feeling repetitive itself. After a wave of Groundhog Day-inspired films across recent years that include Edge of Tomorrow, Happy Death Day, Palm Springs, and the (also) video game-themed Boss Level, Free Guy shakes things just enough to feel fresh.
The video game theme makes for a great fit for the thematic material, and Free Guy often recalls the daily lives of characters in games like Red Dead Redemption 2. These NPCs may be only be programmed to complete specific tasks and have little impact on the world of the players around them, but the worlds they inhabit would feel quite empty without them (just ask anyone who has played Fallout 76).
In one of Free Guy’s finest moments, Guy even digs into Buddhist theology. He may not be “real”, but in the present moment, he’s… something, a something that is having a real impact on the real people that surround him.
Unfortunately, Free Guy is not a metaphysical treatise on artificial intelligence on the level of something like Ex Machina, and as the narrative moves forward the story becomes more and more formulaic. Ultimately, Reynolds’ Guy fades more and more into the background as Free Guy turns into a familiar Hollywood blockbuster.
Despite what the promotional material for Free Guy is selling, Reynolds’ story of sentience only makes up about half of the narrative. The other half is about Comer’s video game developer Millie and her ex-partner Keys (Stranger Things’ Joe Keery), and the evil corporate head (Taika Waititi) who stole their game code and used it to build Free City.
Comer and Keys are both appealing, and Waititi has a lot of fun hamming it up as the evil CEO. But this storyline makes up the bulk of Free Guy’s plot, becomes increasingly formulaic, and takes more and more away from Reynold’s far more interesting character as the film goes along.
Reynolds is unexpectedly engaging as Guy, with the actor’s sarcastic Deadpool bite replaced by an almost childlike innocence; he makes us care more about what is essentially a few lines of code than you might expect. And when Free Guy is at its very best, it makes us identify with those lines of code and draw parallels to our own lives.
