![]() ![]() ![]() When we see folks in the real world playing “Free City,” they’re animated figures.) Ah, but one day Guy spots a badass action avatar named Molotov Girl (a superb and charming Jodie Comer), and he deviates from his NPC pathway - and this sets off a chain of events that reverberates in the “Free City” video game and in the real world.Īs Guy’s actions have a ripple effect within the game, confounding and eventually delighting players all over the globe, there’s some real-world drama involving an enormous d-bag of a video game company guru named Antwan (Taika Waititi, hamming it up). (When we’re inside “Free City,” Guy and Buddy and everyone else are seen as live-action characters. They’re just digital background extras adding an extra measure of realism to the game. In other words, none of the humans playing the game can choose Guy or Buddy, or the coffee barista, or the customers in the bank, et al., as their avatars. What Guy and Buddy don’t know is they’re both NPC’s, or Non Playable Characters, in the “Free City” video game. ![]() They hit the ground, they avoid the carnage, they talk what they’ll do after work - and the next morning, they’ll do it all over again, in the exact same fashion. This doesn’t bother Guy or his best friend, a security guard named Buddy (Lil Rel Howery), in the least, because this the way things work in Free City. Inside Free City, we meet Reynolds’ Guy, a bank teller who puts on the same blue shirt and striped tie and khaki pants every morning, says a chipper hello to his goldfish, Goldie, orders the same coffee from the same barista and heads to work - where some armored villain or another will inevitably burst in and start shooting up the place, because after all, this is a video game. (The closest he’s come to that kind of gravitas was in the little-seen gambling drama “Mississippi Grind.”) In the meantime, he’s perfectly cast in the video-game action comedy “Free Guy,” the latest in the genre of movies about virtual worlds and reality colliding, whether it’s “The Truman Show” or “Inception” or “Serenity” or lighter fare such as “ Ready Player One” or even “Wreck-It Ralph.” Reynolds knocks it out of the park as an eternally optimistic patsy who discovers he’s a patsy and then takes some pretty bold steps to rectify that, mostly because there’s a woman and he’d do anything to be with her, because she’s really something.ĭirected with great style and a suitably pop-art look by Shawn Levy from a script by Matt Lieberman and Zak Penn, “Free Guy” nimbly toggles back and forth between the real world and the world of “Free City,” a globally popular video game played by millions every day. Ryan Reynolds checks those boxes as well, though I don’t think he’s had his “Deliverance” or “Boogie Nights” moment yet. ![]()
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