Every day, for example, Guy's bank is robbed at gunpoint. He and his security guard friend, Buddy (Lil Rel Howery) calmly lie down on the floor each time and discuss their after-work plans.
The reveal isn't a shocker.
Free City is a virtual reality game and Guy is a background character — a non-playable character or NPC.
In the expansive digital universe, Guy is the lowest of the low, an (8-) bit character in a violent cyber city. He's an extra who happens to be played by an A-lister.
Free Guy is a clever if increasingly familiar kind of meta movie that delights in seeing a video game from the inside and turning a background character into a hero.
Directed by Shawn Levy from a script by Matt Lieberman (Scoob!, Playing With Fire) and Zak Penn (who co-wrote Ready Player One), Free Guy gets a significant boost from Jodie Comer, who plays both the VR architect Millie and her in-game avatar, Molotov Girl, and proves a force in either dimension.
There are also gleeful, over-the-top performances by Taika Waititi as the game's diabolical overlord, and Channing Tatum, a very welcome sight, flashing more extreme moves than those in Magic Mike as an in-game avatar.
Levy, a veteran director of warm-hearted comedies (the Night at the Museum movies, Cheaper by the Dozen), has a light touch and he juggles the wildlife of the gaming world as adeptly as he did that of the Natural History Museum.
He is particularly deft at toggling from inside the game to outside it. While Guy, gob-smacked by Molotov Girl, grows beyond his coding and begins to compete with the other “sunglasses people” (players) in the game, Millie and her former programming partner (Joe Keery) investigate whether Soonami, the giant gaming company run by Antwan (Waititi), stole their AI design.
But Free Guy doesn't take its concept anywhere particularly interesting, settling more for video game puns and inner-studio references while at the same time making self-references to its own originality.
Antwan is readying a dumbed-down sequel to Free City that he brags is simply trading on the game's strong IP.
Yet but the end of Free Guy, a movie made by Fox as it was being acquired by the Walt Disney Co, Free Guy chokes on its own pop-culture references, slipping in Star Wars theme music and Captain America's shield.
Maybe I'm being too hard on a mostly-fun-if-forgettable movie.
It's become a kind of trademark of Reynolds, also a producer here, to make big studio films that don't take themselves too seriously, that delight in an eager-to-please, fourth-wall-breaking schtick.
Free Guy isn't as anarchic as Deadpool, but it likes winking at the camera just as much.
Yet for a proudly “original” movie, Free Guy isn't really so original. It's a charming concoction of cliches cribbed from other movies, from Tron to Truman, without its own coding.
Free Guy, a 20th Century Fox release, is rated M by the Motion Picture Association of America for strong fantasy violence throughout, language and crude/suggestive references. Running time: 115 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.
