Think of Guy as a happy person. At one with himself and the world, he lives in Free City, doesn’t mind the fact that he has no choice, that every shirt and pair of pants in the closet is the same, doesn’t notice that he only treads predetermined paths and only creams in the coffee shop Can order coffee with two lumps of sugar and wishes each of his customers in the bank not just a good day, but an extra good day. Even to the bank robbers who attack his workplace several times a day with submachine guns, he reacts surprisingly indifferently. He’s such an everyday guy that his name is just Guy, just like his best friend is just called Buddy.
But then his ideal world starts to crack, because like Will Ferrell before him in “Stranger Than Fiction” and Jim Carrey in “The Truman Show”, Ryan Reynold’s character now realizes that his world is only the creation of an entertainment god. Guy’s not a bank clerk, just a background character in a video game. A creation of the two game developers Millie (Jodie Comer) and Keys (Joe Keery). And because every work of art carries the DNA of the creator, an unfulfilled longing for love that resembles a ticking time bomb slumbers in a corner of his programmed heart. One day when he meets the fighting amazon Molotov Girl on the streets of Free City, his algorithm is turned upside down. As if he had swallowed the red matrix pill, he suddenly realizes his limits – and wants to overcome them. Like other KIs in the cinema before him, in films like “Blade Runner” or “Ex Machina”, in series like “Humans” or “West World”, he discovers free will and the potential to develop. Knowledge, however, was already a problem in Biblical Paradise.
The filmmakers sample the best ideas of the popcorn cinema of the last few years
Director Shawn Levy is a big boy with a penchant for cinematic mind games: for example, he brought the exhibits of the National Museum to life in “Nachts im Museum”, in “Date Night” rushed an ordinary couple on an action trip through New York and in ” Real Steel “elevated a junk robot to a mechanic’s best friend. Now he plays the virtual world of a computer game and the real world against each other and has found the perfect ally in Ryan Reynolds. With lovable charm, childlike amazement and rapid quick-wittedness, he has made it a high art to first come across as very naive, with an almost debilitating grin, and then smuggle in more and more nuances and refractions. It’s a bit like a white canvas slowly filling up with a complex image.
In “Free Guy” the scriptwriters Matt Liebermann and Zak Penn and the director Shawn Levy sample a whole lot of good ideas from the popcorn cinema of the last few years, from “Matrix” to “Truman Show” to “Deadpool” and “Inception”: Because so Just as the agents searched for secrets in their dreams, so now the avatars of the game developers have to find evidence in the game that their boss (a mercilessly chargeable Taika Waititi) stole their ideas. And just as the dream worlds disintegrated into pixel seas in “Inception”, so do the game worlds now. The whole thing is great, not too serious fun, thought up by grown men. A tiny bit of sense of mission is also present when Free Guy propagates the charm of non-violence and is celebrated in the gamer community as the “Blue Shirt Guy”.
Free guy, USA / Canada / Japan 2021 – Director: Shawn Levy. Book: Matt Liebermann, Zak Penn. Camera: George Richmond. Starring: Ryan Reynolds, Jodie Comer. Disney, 115 minutes. In the cinema.