Game for a laugh
FREE GUY
12A
In cinemas now
Cert ★★★★
Is it finally game on for the video game movie? Like Sonic The Hedgehog, Detective Pikachu and Jumanji, Free Guy is a gaming flick that presses the right buttons.
Our hero, Guy (Ryan Reynolds), is a non-player character (or NPC) who is stuck in a loop as a bank cashier in a violent open-world game that plays a lot like Grand Theft Auto.
This means, a bit like those poor robots in Sky Atlantic’s Westworld, his daily grind involves getting shot at, battered or run over by human players.
Every day, Guy happily pulls on the same shirt, orders the same coffee and walks the same route to work with his best pal Buddy (Lil Rel Howery).
But something inside him snaps when he spots a strangely familiar woman ( Jodie Comer) who is packing two pistols and wearing the tell-tale sunglasses of a human avatar.
The next day, he does something completely unexpected. He fights back.
During his daily bank robbery, he turns the gun on his attacker.
When he tries on his assailant’s sunglasses, he can see a world festooned with icons representing power-ups, Medikits and missions.
You don’t need a pair of magic specs to see what powers Free Guy, which has elements of Wreck-It Ralph, The Lego Movie, The Truman Show and Ready Player One coded into its DNA.
It’s a familiar-but-fun family blockbuster that doesn’t take itself remotely seriously. Crucially, director Shawn Levy (Night At The Museum) is making the video game play by movie rules, not the other way round.
As Guy teams up with Comer’s game designer to save his virtual world from a megalomaniac developer (Taika Waititi), we get cameos, zinging one-liners, slick action scenes and a very unusual romance.
It all moves at such a clip you don’t notice that not a lot of it makes sense.
Elements of Wreck-It Ralph and The Truman Show are coded into its DNA