Rating: 4/5
Today I went to see Free Guy in the cinema.
My review contains smaller spoiler for the first 30 minutes, especially in the first paragraph.
The plot is simple: Guy is an NPC in an open urban world called Free City, which can be better compared to GTA Online. Hundreds or even thousands of players are in this online world and wreak havoc, complete orders or fight each other for reputation, experience points and loot. The man is one of several thousand NPCs who follow their daily programmed routine. If they die, they will be reset. Within the open world, it is presented as real to the viewer, with real actors rather than animated, as you might have learned from Oasis in Ready Player One. However, if you look from reality at a screen that the game is currently running on, you can clearly see that it is just a game shown in the game graphics. Guy is now developing his own consciousness and wants to do more than just follow his programmed daily routine, even though he has no idea that his world is nothing but a virtual game world and that he and his friends are nothing but NPCs. One day he attacks a player who speaks against his programs. Players and developers think that the player has just adopted his skin, but no one knows the truth. The guy takes the goggles from the player’s avatar, which serves as a “show heads”. When he wears it, he sees things that only players would normally see. He encounters a player who has a personal feud with the developer/publisher of the game and fights her own battle.
The first 60 minutes of the movie are great. Humor is mostly great, even if it’s a little silly at times. I wanted the movie to be at least more serious. In the first half of the film, the game comes to the fore, as well as Guy, who is developing an awareness and learning to level up and improve himself. It’s a lot of fun and gets better and better at interacting with the player Millie and for a moment you think the focus of the movie shifts from slapstick and humor to something more dramatic, which unfortunately doesn’t happen. So the second half is a little behind the odds. Unfortunately, a lot of potential is wasted here and somehow the game takes a back seat. I would have liked to see more of the guy fighting for loot, credits and prestige. Unfortunately, I missed it a bit, because that’s the best part of the movie.
In my opinion, Ready Player One did a much better job than that. The movie takes itself a bit more seriously and is also more believable in the real world. Here the lousy manager is an absolute idiot (played by Taika Waititi). It’s ridiculous, stupid and unbelievable. The managing director of Oasis developers at RPO was more believable and smart. In addition, the numbers remain a bit lackluster in reality, which is also better resolved in the RPO.
The representation of the game world and the meaning of the game is better and more believable in Oasis than RPO. Oasis also always appears in game graphics, but usually “Free City” appears to us as real. There are also special player suits in the RPO and you can see more about how the controls work. They put more thought into it, and Free Guy simply lost here.
Free Guy also lags behind RPO musically. RPO has really great music from the 80s and combines it with modernity. In Free Guy, the music is less straightforward.
conclusion
All in all, this all sounds very negative, but Free Guy isn’t actually at all. He’s super funny, and he’s got the adorable Ryan Reynolds, which he obviously enjoys and his humor often makes me laugh or smile at. But unfortunately the movie exaggerates the gossip, and unfortunately the movie doesn’t take itself seriously enough. Plus, it’s a shame that the game, despite being the focus, always plays only the second fiddle. I just lack that certainty here to make something cool out of the movie. But like I said, the movie is still very interesting and therefore does a lot of things right. But I probably won’t watch the movie very often.
8/10 points – low return value
