Free Guy Review

Ryan Reynolds is one of those actors who as of late, mostly plays the same character in everything he's in. Usually cocky and sarcastic, his characters are varying versions of the persona he presents in real life. Sometimes that works and sometimes it gets old. Consequently, I find it's not too often that I get excited about a project he's involved in. This was very much my feeling prior to viewing Free Guy.

In Free Guy, Ryan Reynolds plays Guy, an ordinary guy who over a series of events, discovers that he's actually an NPC in a video game (otherwise known as a non-player character for the people like me who aren't familiar with gamer lingo). While this naturally leads to an existential crisis, soon he learns he must team up with the real woman of his dreams (Jodie Comer) before the world as he knows it is destroyed. This is because meanwhile in the actual real world, the two software engineers who created the coding for the game (Comer along with Joe Keery) are told by the boss of the company that bought them out (Taika Waititi) that after a sequel for the game comes out he will completely erase everything they created.

Free Guy plays a LOT like a live-action version of The Lego Movie, down to the films' hopefully naive protagonists and honestly, it's not a bad thing at all. It's really nice to see Ryan Reynolds playing against his usual type here and he's quite fun in this movie. Jodie Comer is also terrific as Millie, both inside and outside of the game. Together they work together really well and make a nice team.

I only really had two problems with the movie. First, it definitely didn't need to be two hours long. If this had been trimmed down by a half hour the movie's pace never would have lagged. Second, a last-minute reveal that makes for an incredibly cute and sweet ending needed a lot more setup throughout the movie to have really felt earned. Overall though I had a lot of fun with Free Guy and I appreciated that for a big summer movie, it felt like something different than just another superhero blockbuster.

RATING: 7/10