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Free Guy

The more time that passes since watching Free Guy, the less inclined I feel to write anything about it. This is a Ryan Reynolds vehicle about the limitless possibilities of an AI character breaking out of a computer game scenario. Or, more accurately, it could have been. Instead, it gives us a very fluffy, fluro-coloured vomit of 'learning', accompanied by some Deadpool-lite shtick. Come on guys, break out of your rut, don't always be in the background, tell her you love her. Jodie Comer plays Millie, the femme fatale in game and the cheated code writer out of it. Her screen time with Reynolds's Guy is one of the higher points in the film, but her screen time with Joe Keery's Keys is one of the lower points. This may be due to Keery's lack of charisma or perhaps the clearly telegraphed relationship horizon between them, either way, these scenes don't float.

Throughout the film I found myself willing it to be more Her, or even Electric Dreams, but gradually had to cop the fact that it was closer to Ready Player One. Imagine my surprise (hello Viz) when I saw that Zak Penn (he of the above Spielberg trash) also co-wrote Free Guy. After minor research it would appear that Penn - and co-writer Matt Lieberman - spend most of their time wallowing in family entertainment guffles like Playing with Fire and Inspector Gadget, so as some funny bugger once said, the plot thins.

The meaty stuff - the NPC (non-player character, look at me, I'm doing some learning) Guy falling for Molotov Girl Millie, even though he's not an actual person, Millie kind of reciprocating, the ethics behind treating the AI with rights and dignity - this is all trampled by the 'feel-good' shit. The Disney swallow of Fox also meant that all Walt's other IPs were fair game for insertion, so we get a bollocks flurry of hat-tips to Marvel, Star Wars and probably other stuff, more alien to me, that I missed. On that note, there were a bunch of irritating game-nerd man-boys behind me in the screening who groaned or giggled when the 'reaction' streamers or vloggers appeared. All way above my head.

A missed opportunity this, but with Penn penning and Shawn Levy directing we probably shouldn't have hoped for too much in the way of clever, witty or original. And they completely wasted their one PG-13 permitted 'fuck'.

See also:

Spike Jonze's Her (2013) is fantastic and the documentary iHuman (2019), directed by Tonje Hessen Schei was frighteningly interesting.

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