Free Guy

BFD for the NPC

or

Thumb-Twitching at the Movies

 

Guy (Ryan Reynolds) wakes up every morning, feeds his fish ("Good morning, Goldie!"), pulls out his usual outfit—short-sleeved blue shirt, khakis—from a closet full of short-sleeved blue shirts and khakis, brushes his teeth, eats breakfasts, grabs a coffee (medium coffee, cream, two sugars) and goes to his job as a bank teller ("Don't have a good day. Have a great day!")...which will be robbed...every day. Without fail.

 

Oh, I didn't mention the commute.

 

Guy lives in Free City, which is a video-game. Walking to work, he is constantly witness to all sorts of disasters, natural and unnatural, none of which can kill him if he's on his normal route to the bank. He is an NPC—a non-playing character, an extra, a background figure. He's coded, but he's robotic. Unless something hits him and kills him, he's going to do the same thing, go the same route, be the same Guy, a nobody, a drone, a cog, a non-essential worker.

And I know how he feels.

Guy's a part of the landscape, but Free City is constantly invaded by the muckery inflicted by real-world players, all represented by avatars wearing sunglasses. The chaos they cause is just part of the routine, until Guy notices a woman (Jodie Comer) walking down the street, bopping to the Mariah Carey song "Fantasy" which he recognizes. Why, you may ask? Well, that would be spoilery (and, frankly, a little unbelievable—but, go with it). He's intrigued by her, wants to know who she is, and inspires him to don player sun-glasses he's acquired from one of the bank-heist perps.

What he finds is a real-player's perspective of his world—pixelated mind blown! He is made aware of an entirely new world in which he is not merely a part, but could become a participant; he has some measure of control and he knows that the woman—named "Molotovgirl"—is somehow involved. So, he must find her, and find out what he needs to know to become the master of his own fate.

Tough work. But, the cast—especially in the Free City sections—makes it enjoyable. Because that whole area is a fantasy and anything can happen (including cameos) there are surprises and Easter eggs galore, plus it has Ryan Reynolds at his most winsome. The movie is more of a slog out in the real world where the issues are creative rights over code rather than self-actualization, and despite the best efforts of these actors—Taika Waititi tries damned hard for laughs and Comer's real-life programmer Millie has less jolt than Molotovgirl—these sections of the film must be endured, rather than enjoyed.

Of course, you've seen it before...and better. The "Simulation Hypothesis" has been around since people decided they liked their dreams better than being awake. The trope was used in a lot of "Twilight Zone's" and other sci-fi/fantasy product like Rainer Werner Fassbinder's World on a Wire, the "Men in Black" series, The Matrix (of course) and Ready Player One. One of my favorite instances was in an episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation"—"Ship in a Bottle"—where, after trapping a hologram of Professor Moriarty in a small cube version of a holo-suite, Captain Picard muses "Who knows? Our reality may be very much like theirs, and all this might just be an elaborate simulation, running inside a little device sitting on someone's table." 

 

Just so.

The concept is so fascinating that real-world people can abandon their limited lives to immerse themselves in the video-worlds to imagine themselves as better versions (in the things they admire—like kill-ratios) while their biological clock is ticking down, all in the quest of earning more imaginary lives. Video games are the crypto-currency in our biological banking system. But, do they value their psuedo-lives more? Than their actual lives? Results may vary.  I sense a screenplay synopsis coming on.

For me, I don't play video games anymore. I find them a waste of my dwindling time here on Earth. So, I didn't "geek" over Free Guy, a lot of the inside referenced going right over my head. But, I enjoyed enough of it that I didn't care—and the movie plays well enough without insider knowledge. I also liked the fact that I got to watch it on free HBO while staying in a hotel in Oregon, a way to pass the time where I didn't "want those two hours of my life back"—real or virtually.