Free Guy (2021) Movie Review and Synopsis

Free Guy (2021) Movie Review and Synopsis

Here is a configuration that resembles the image as a whole from "The LEGO Movie", and "Free Guy" and is a cute Guy (Ryan Reynolds), an NPC (personnage non joueur) in a video game in the world. "Ville Free". He wears the same clothes every day, orders the same coffee, and goes to work at the same bank, which is robbed several times a day by real players in this "Grand Theft Auto" game. He does not care. Things are going great for Guy and his best friend Buddy (Lil Rel Howery) until the cheerful boy sees a real gamer calling himself a Molotov girl (Comer) and crashes his model while following the pin-up woman down the street.

As he becomes more and more interested in the Molotov girl and where she might go, he gets his hands on a pair of sunglasses that show what real players see in this world, including missions, kits, medical devices, hubs, and more. be familiar to modern gamers, although some of the technology here seems outdated. (Note: This was a brilliant move to bring in real gamers and streamers like Ninja, Pokimane, and DanTDM - cameos that will amaze kids who know these personalities.)

Back in the real world, we learn that Molotov's girlfriend is a programmer named Millie, who, along with another tech genius named Keyes (Joe Keery), was working on creating a truly ambitious virtual game that would replicate the real world in the world. just giving players brutal missions to complete. She is in the Free City trying to find evidence that the game's self-absorbed editor Antwan (Taika Waititi) stole her code and twisted it into this mild experience where Guy proves to be the ideal inner man... From Trinity to his Neo, the two forms an alliance to destroy the "Free City" from within, starting with Guy's refusal to raise his rank through violence. Guy chooses only the positive missions of the game and becomes an internet hit as the world tries to figure out who this mysterious player might be without realizing what he is, in fact, is the most outstanding breakthrough in history: artificial intelligence. When Millie and Keys discover what has been created here, they seek to save a genuine offensive of brazen capitalism.

Director Shawn Levy did a wonderful job

Director Shawn Levy did a wonderful job snapping and singing "Free Guy" in several entertaining scenes in the first half, including a great montage of Guy's "good" missions and a hilarious scene in which Keys and his castmate Mouser (Utkarsh Ambudkar) chase Guy. but it does start to lose momentum throughout the day, returning to many of the same plot points and themes. Instead of developing its own identity, the film tries to shed the overt influence of other projects like The Matrix, Ready Player One, and even The Truman Show, while dropping references with increasing regularity, which is realistic for videos. games and pop culture. . The best moments of the film reveal the potential of this concept; the worst seems to mimic the best designs.

More information about Free Guy (2021)

“Free Guy” is the title of Ryan Reynolds’ sci-fi action comedy, literally a reference to the subtle and witty 2006 magical realism tragicomedy The Character, for which Will Ferrell received a nomination for “ Golden Globe.

The original title contains a play on words, since the main character's name is Guy (guy in English means "guy"). And the best friend of the protagonist is called Buddy (buddy from English - “buddy”). The authors of the comedy, with a slight movement of the hand pressing the right buttons, break the laws of both cinema and life, denying the postulate that positive, modest and ordinary guys are of no interest to anyone on the screen and are not able to achieve anything in real life, because they are too boring for the first and too spineless for the second.

Against the background of serious dramas about political, racial, gender, religious, sexual and any other kind of freedom, "Character" in an entertaining, funny, unweighted, but at the same time not stupid and conceptually well-thought-out key, speaks of the freedom of the most routine and at the same time universal denying the need to mechanically fulfill standardized programs imposed by society, not to leave the zone of a prescribed social role, to fit into the framework of one or another archetype: a guy, a friend, a beauty, a nerd, a macho, a villain, a hero ... Of course, in life it is much more difficult to go beyond clichés and labels than in the movies. But it's still possible. At least, this is what the filmmakers are calling for, who do not at all boast of the thoughtfulness of their message, but offer to spend time both cool and wisely.

The main character named Guy lives in a metropolis called Free City. He works as a bank teller, befriends a bank security guard, likes gum flavored ice cream, wakes up at the same time every day, greets Goldie the aquarium fish, wears a blue shirt and beige trousers (only blue shirts and only beige trousers in his closet) , like the professor from the horror movie "The Fly"), goes outside, orders a medium coffee with milk and sugar in the cafeteria, greets policeman Johnny, who always sits at a table by the window, and wishes everyone "not a good day, but a great day" .

Guy is quite satisfied with his monotonous and ordinary life, quietly and affably does his ordinary monotonous work and prefers, as they say, never to stick out anywhere, to abide by the rules and laws of the genre, according to which not everyone falls to be the main characters, most are destined for the role of secondary characters or even faceless extras, and they are not destined to repulse bank robbers or hooligans who create outrage on the streets, their lot is to meekly raise their hands up and lie down face down. However, the guy sincerely hopes to someday meet the girl of his dreams. And meets. Cool, sexy, emancipated, with guns at the ready. And this meeting radically changes both Guy himself and his ideas about the surrounding reality.

Director Shawn Levy ate the dog on comedies for family viewing. The Cheaper by the Dozen franchise, the relaunched Pink Panther, Night at the Museum… are all his work. The director also came into contact with science fiction more than once: he owns a touching story about a father, son and a vintage boxing robot "Real Steel" with Hugh Jackman, as well as the main Netflix series hit Stranger Things , nostalgic for pop culture and sci-fi 1980 -X. And screenwriter Zack Penn has already dealt with video games while working on an adaptation of Ready Player One.. In "Character" Levy and Penn inherit the painting by Mark Forster (which in the original is also not "Character" at all, but Stranger than Fiction, which means "Stranger than Fiction"), where the main character played by Ferrell, the most ordinary guy Harold, works tax inspector, leads a deadly monotonous life, waking up and falling asleep at the same time and even counting the movements of the toothbrush while brushing his teeth, but one day he begins to hear a mysterious voice that comments on all his actions, and thinks he is going crazy. The voice turns out to be the syllable of a novelist (Emma Thompson), and Harold is the character of her new work. The fiction writer loves tragic endings and, while finishing the novel, is preparing to kill the hero, which the poor fellow, who has realized that he is a puppet in the hands of a puppeteer, is trying to prevent.

Shawn Levy practically filmed a remake of Forster's "Character" (where the hero wore a similar duty suit of an unremarkable ordinary gray or blue color, rhyming with Guy's gray-blue office shirts - a reference to the so-called blue and gray collars, that is, workers of the lower level and the service sector) , but only for a wider, including teenage, and less intellectual audience, who grew up not on books, but on video games. Therefore, the literary space, alien to today's teenagers, has replaced the computer field. It can be said that in the comedy with Reynolds there are also echoes of the cult "Truman Show" (it is no coincidence that for today's generation Ryan Reynolds is a kind of symbiosis of Jim Carrey and Will Ferrell, only concurrently endowed with an ideal appearance), but without tragic mood nuances and in the plane of commercial,

Free City is a witty caricature of any real metropolis, where freedom is the prerogative of only a select elite, the powerful of this world, who do not have laws written, who do what they want and live as they want (in the film, these are players who put on any skins and fix chaos on streets: blow up, rob, kill, earn money and points). All the rest are not free either in desires, or in means, or in choice; are squeezed by the narrow boundaries of their tiny possibilities: to be a barista and brew coffee, to be a cashier and count money, to be a salesman, a hairdresser, a waitress ... a voiceless background, a meek and humble extras for the ruling establishment (in the film this is an NPC, that is, Non-Player Character, non-fiction computer game characters whose behavior is determined by the program).

It is noteworthy that the events of "Free Guy" take place not only inside the game, but also outside it, and in the real world the story unfolds no less fascinating than inside Free City (on the other side of the computer monitor, the war against arbitrariness and injustice is waged by idealistic gamedevs performed by Jodie Comer from Killing Eve and Joe Keery from Stranger Things). And of course, Reynolds took the opportunity to remind fans that Deadpool, the free guy of the comic galaxy, is now part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (and all Fox projects are now owned by Disney). Therefore, Taika Waititi, the director of the films Thor: Ragnarok, is villainous in the "Character", "Thor: Love and Thunder" and playing the role of Korg, who recently appeared in a promotional video with Deadpool; and at the climax of the climactic brawl, Guy pulls an ace out of his sleeve, and it's... Well, you'll see.