MANILA, PHILIPPINES — In a world where streaming video games and virtual reality has never been more prevalent, it’s sometimes difficult to separate what reality is from fantasy. Millions of people lose themselves in virtual gaming, often choosing to participate in bloodbaths and “battle royales” online to escape their lot in life. The pandemic has only made that simulation only more appealing because, after all, in cyberspace, you can roam around freely and there’s no pandemic threatening your health when you breathe outdoors. What would you do, though, if you found out that you are part of the simulation and you’re not “real” at all? That’s one of the big questions raised in Free Guy.
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Guy (Ryan Reynolds) wakes up every day and goes through the same routine without complaint. He says hi to his goldfish, has his cereal, wears the same colored outfits, orders the same coffee, and walks to work with his best friend, bank security guard Buddy (Lil Rel Howery). They then proceed to get robbed several times a day, as different people enter the bank to steal from its vault.
Guy tells Buddy that he’s hoping to meet the girl of his dreams someday and he believes that she’s out there. On one particular day though, Guy bumps into “Molotov Girl” (Jodie Comer), whose singing of “Fantasy” by Mariah Carey engrosses him. In this world that they live in, people wearing sunglasses are superheroes so when Guy takes a pair of sunglasses from a stranger trying to rob the bank, he’s stunned by what he sees.
Guy is apparently a video game character in Free City, an online open-world video game developed by Soonami Games. As a non-playable character (NPC), Guy is like Buddy and most of the other characters he encounters daily, just supporting characters who react to actual players who enter the game. The sunglasses give Guy the perspective of the players’ heads up display (HUD), allowing him access to power ups and other abilities.
When Guy interacts with Molotov Girl, he has no idea that there’s a real person playing her, Millie Rusk, who co-developed an unreleased game called Life Itself with Waler “Keys” McKey (Joe Keery). The source code for Life Itself was stolen by Antwan Hovachelik (Taika Waititi) to create Free City, and Millie has been playing as Molotov Girl to look for evidence of the stolen code. Meanwhile, Keys has capitulated and taken a job with Soonami under Antwan.
Millie doesn’t know that Guy is just an NPC and assumes he’s just another player named “Blue Shirt Guy” while Keys and his co-worker Mouser (Utkarsh Ambudkar) assume that Guy is a hacker disguised as an NPC and they try to ban him from the game. When Guy keeps leveling up as he performs good deeds, players of Free City start rooting for him, turning him into a worldwide sensation. For Guy though, he just wants to spend time with Molotov Girl, but she’s still trying to look for the code.
Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) like Fortnite, Call of Duty: Warzone, and Apex Legends have been hugely popular for the past few years as more and more people have welcomed the open world play that they offer. Since there’s no linear plot to move the game forward, players have numerous ways to progress and thanks to the online element, can interact with other players all over the world.
Yet for games like these and from previous generations, NPCs have always been part of them because they help the player proceed further. With Free Guy, director Shawn Levy and screenwriters Zak Penn and Matt Lieberman get to explore what happens to those NPCs when they’re not interacting with players. There are echoes of 1998’s The Truman Show here as Guy, like Jim Carrey’s Truman before him, has no idea that he’s part of a simulation. What Guy believes to be normal is actually programmed for him to do and he can’t do anything about it.
When he starts deviating from his program and gradually thinks for himself, Millie and Keys are stunned to discover that they’ve developed artificial intelligence from a source code that they created. That next level of computer evolution has been explored as far back as the early Terminator movies from the 1980s and even 2001: A Space Odyssey. Unlike those examples, however, there is no malevolence in Guy’s evolution. Instead, he’s just trying to look for his dream girl and does so by helping other characters in the game.
Reynolds plays Guy with an enthusiasm and innocence that one would expect from a veritable blank slate that his NPC status embodies. These are supposed to be the background figures, ones that only push the action forward but aren’t essential, so when he does gain awareness of his surroundings, Guy is astonished by what he discovers.
For Keery and Comer, whose success up to this point have been from their TV work in Stranger Things and Killing Eve respectively, Free Guy allows them to spread their wings a bit more and play characters outside Steve Harrington and Villanelle. Taika Waititi also got to return to being in front of the camera in this instance and seemed to relish playing the over-the-top and morally bankrupt villain Antwan.
Still, this is definitely a movie built around Reynolds, and like he’s proven before, he’s now adept at playing the protagonist. Being able to portray someone aside from Deadpool must be liberating for him as that character’s success can lead to Reynolds being typecast. Thankfully, Free Guy will likely keep that from happening.
