Though it’s a witty sleeper hit, the real lesson of ‘Free Guy’ should be obvious: Opening movies in theaters and at home is bad business.
“Free Guy,” starring Ryan Reynolds as a minor character in a video game who breaks out of his drone existence, is one of the fizziest movies you’ll ever see that has a bona fide brain. At first, it may remind you of a lot of other films — it’s like “The Truman Show” crossed with “Ralph Breaks the Internet,” sprinkled with “The Lego Movie” and “Groundhog Day.” But it turns into a rollicking, candified head trip. It’s like a Christopher Nolan film that actually wants to do nothing but entertain you. What’s infectious about “Free Guy” is that it’s such a smart kinetic comedy about what’s real and what’s not. Reynolds’ character, named Guy (and known as Blue Shirt Guy), lives a life of total hypnotized unreality; he thinks grabbing his coffee in the morning and going to work in a bank, where he says things like “Don’t have a good day — have a great day!,” is what happiness is all about. But when he puts on techno sunglasses and starts to see what the heroes of video games see, he wakes right up. His coded synapses begin to fire independently. He comes alive with a will of his own. He touches the reality on the other side of the game (and the people who designed the game start to see the reality they created reflected in him). Directed with breakthrough levels of finesse by Shawn Levy, “Free Guy” is a delirious digital fairy tale about perceiving the virtual in the real and vice versa. It’s a hallucination for our time. And given that it’s a movie about one character’s crusade to connect with the real, there’s something about it that seems almost poetic: “Free Guy,” by being released in theaters only (it’s the rare movie this summer that’s not competing with itself on a streaming service), exists in a pure “real” zone of buzz-driven, old-school great escapism.
