Free Guy

A pleasant relax movie. A multi-player game of GTA filmed with real people with the message that you can do whatever you want that rides on Reynolds’ crazy humor and wild action scenes. The laid-back, optimistic atmosphere isn’t what I would have expected in the world of Grand Theft Auto, but I enjoyed it. Waititi’s villain must have seemed like a really exaggerated caricature, but he delivers in style... (09/28/2021)

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)

Since my motor skills aren't what they used to be I spend most of my days watching movies and (who knew?) playing online games. So Free Guy was just the perfect thing for me. In the game I'm currently playing the most, NPCs don't get eliminated, so I didn't have to feel guilty and could have a lot of fun watching Guy's fate. It wasn’t hard to enjoy this movie, because the writing wasn't bad at all, the cast was multicultural but the choices made sense, the dialogue wasn’t dumb, and Dude had the best unscripted lines I've ever heard. It would have deserved five stars if it hadn't been for the clumsy romance that slowed down the pace and the inspirational speeches followed by typically American "spontaneous" applause. (01/01/2022)

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)