COLECO ERGO SUM
Sweet and sassy game-based action flick blends philosophy with comedic violence
If The Matrix and The Truman Show had a baby, which was then adopted by They Live and Inception, with Blade Runner and Thor: Ragnarok and Ready Player One as a thruple of godparents — well, you might end up with something as sweet and sassy and wonderfully deranged as Free Guy. Or you might not — with that many factors in play, it's a genetic lottery that's unlikely to produce the same result twice.
Ryan Reynolds stars as Guy, a bank teller living in an online game called Free City — think Grand Theft Auto meets Fortnite, if you're not too tired of thinking this-meets-that. His every day is the same — wake up, greet the goldfish, grab a coffee from the barista, go to work at the bank with Buddy the security guard, duck and cover when bank robbers burst in, and maybe find time to deliver his catchphrase: “Don't have a good day — have a great day!”
At some point he goes to sleep or into that sleep of death, but no dreams may come for this NPC (non-playable character). He reawakens and the day repeats. (Did I mention that Groundhog Day was the movie's uncle? And Wreck-It Ralph a second cousin?)
It's great fun watching Reynolds blithely navigate his way around Free City as bullets buzz overhead, pimped-out vehicles crash into buildings and people are thrown through windows, and worse. He affects the same calm, mildly insouciant bemusement he perfected in The Hitman's Bodyguard and its sequel, and to a lesser extent in The Proposal and some of his many advertisements. Shucking his Deadpool persona like a soiled leather glove, he's a grinning, harmless Everyman.
Director, fellow Canadian and future collaborator Shawn Levy (the two have another science-fiction title, The Adam Project, coming to Netflix next year) has great fun with the design of Free Guy. I love that Guy's kitchen table includes one of those endlessly drinking bird mobile and a line of dominoes ready to be toppled, except they're arranged in a closed loop.
The film is also full of Easter eggs, from the obscure to the blindingly obvious, but I shan't spoil any. Though I did find the cameo by the late Alex Trebek a little odd, a reminder of how long Free Guy's release has been put on hold by the pandemic.
But I can also reveal that the main cast members are a winning bunch, including comedian Lil Rel Howery as Guy's in-game bestie, Buddy. Outside the game, Jodie Comer stars as Millie Rusk, though in Free City she goes by Molotov Girl and sports a British accent, which is also how the actress speaks in our real world.
She and Keys (Joe Keery) are programmers who once designed a game architecture that was bought by tech magnate Antoine, played by a delightfully unhinged Taika Waititi. Antoine folded its code into the servers of Free City, with the result that Guy has access to way more computing power than anyone planned. He might even be the world's first truly intelligent (and funny!) AI.
When Guy gets his hands on a pair of the sunglasses that human players sport in the game, he is able to see his world for what it really is — a patchwork of power-ups, weapons caches and deadly missions. He still doesn't understand that there's a higher-level reality — that will come later — but he can play within the physics of the game, bending them to his new-found will. Oh, and he also falls in love with Millie's avatar.
So on the one hand Free Guy functions as a philosophical primer for a lot of cool, think-y notions about free will versus determinism, and the way that Gordian knot gets tangled up with the idea of happiness. As Buddy points out to Guy in one of the film's quieter moments, everything we experience is real, even if it's only a video-game simulacrum of a larger reality. Coleco ergo sum, if you will.
But on the other hand, we get great swaths of funny cartoon violence as Millie and Guy race around the streets of Free City, trying to save it from the machinations of the evil Antoine.
The movie perfectly combines the urgency of the end of the world with the giddy joy of a popcorn action-adventure tale.
You could take the same basic ingredients from Free
Guy, give them a shake and a twist and wind up with a dour head-scratcher like the one with Owen Wilson (Bliss) or Matthew McConaughey (Serenity). Instead, Levy and Reynolds have concocted a funny, original story, with one screw loose and the rest just tight enough to hold things together.
So press Start, sit back and enjoy.