Free Guy

This feel-good Disney hybrid of The Truman Show and Tron has a nice portion of enticing romance and action in the spirit of Ready Player One. It’s nicely cast and pleasantly colorful, with typically appealing cliché elements and some fine ideas. But the dramatic framework, with the characters’ motivations and reasons for doing what they do, is a bit slapdash. But it’s my problem that I want such a movie to be logically fleshed out and everything in it to make sense. (08/12/2021)

Game character Ryan Reynolds has become sentient and decided to do good, and that can have far-reaching consequences in the game. This action comedy relies on a combination of wild action, slightly wacky humor, a bunch of pop culture references, a very plucky hero and an unexpectedly positive atmosphere. It's fun to watch. (08/14/2021)

I like The Matrix comparison a lot, because it illustrates the transformation of the perception of pretty similar themes. The Matrix is about the problem of disconnection from an oppressive system, Free Guy is a film primarily about adapting to oppression and ultimately defends the artificial system. It pretends to be an anti-capitalist fable, with the antagonist, the evil businessman, ultimately being punished by the invisible hand of the market. Similarly, it pretends to be a film about the need to break free from repetitive mechanisms, but in the end it merely replaces them with other repetitive mechanisms. And no, it's not a conscious thing. It offers all this with the white-knuckled grin of a podcaster trying to sell you his Kickstarter project with artificial enthusiasm. Cyberpunk dystopia has been around for a long time, and it's pretty faithful to its predecessors. Yet they still failed to appreciate that such a reality would look not like decimated metropoles but like ubiquitous sunny franchises full of coolness and camaraderie, because they apparently didn't think to work with the powers of marketing capitalism at all. Thus, twenty years after young directors succeeded in making prescient science fiction about how humans are unable to disconnect from the system through which machines have discovered, among other things, that the human condition is defined through suffering, we are faced with a conformist blah film shot like a Starbucks commercial that tries hysterically to pretend how fresh and young it is. Except it's devotee shit from a 50-year-old director with a 45-year-old protagonist, made for the assured man-children on whom the whole system rests and whose idea of resistance is Movember and dry February. Oh, and it's 80% on Rotten Tomatoes. So shoot yourself immediately. (11/09/2021)

Finally, someone found the balls to film GTA in all its glory and put together some healthy sophisticated romance onto it with nonchalant elegance. A great portion of fun, which is a bit hurt by the dodgy visuals and uneven pace, but it is reliably compensated by a well of great directorial ideas and the traditionally fun Reynolds. (09/29/2021)

Free Guy is Tron: Legacy strained through the sieve of Idiocracy, but instead of satarising bullshit, it gives the illusion of freedom with an ingratiating corporate smile. Free Guy shows the absurd degradation of the ideals of cyberpunk into a mediocre tale for a generation weaned on social-media myths about the exclusivity and brilliance of every individual. The film’s messianic romance, financed by the mega-corporation Disney, which is something that William Gibson never dreamed of, performs a diversion manoeuvre in the form of a cartoonish villain, while shoving prefabricated illusions, bought-off YouTube stars and its own bling down the throats of its adolescent target audience. It is also starting to be sad how Ryan Reynolds is becoming a slave to his doggedly constructed image as a bad-boy nerd as he begins to embody the cliché of 40-somethings playing young men chasing after would-be broad-minded women in their twenties. (11/28/2021)