Review of Free Guy (2021) by Hydrabird — 13 Aug 2021

I got the chance to see this, via Screen Unseen at Odeon. And God, I was disappointed. I had 3 main gripes with this mediocre mess: cinematography, writing, and casting.

Starting off, I found nothing of narrative worth, interesting or new concepts, or entertaining jokes. I think I only laughed once, something beyond a nasal exhale. Whilst talking plot, they clearly don't understand how online games work, even how servers work at all. Games don't slowly just dissapear when being turned off, and in this case, destroyed. The characters don't change at all, or change in literally half a second. Especially the human characters. The ending comes to mind, with her randomly realising the programmer dude, forgot what he's called, just that generic, loves her or whatever. Randomly cuts in the middle of the hug too for whatever reason. Cinematography to me just felt generic. Bland. Nothing. No interesting colour uses, similar lighting throughout, just half assed. I guess the repeating shots are interesting, following the patterns of AI, I suppose.

Casting was a major issue, as with the presence of Taika Waititi. The first thing that comes to mind when a gaming company CEO comes up, is not an old dude from New Zealand, dressed in a mix between hobo clothes and Supreme.

This instantly came off to me as The Lego Movie -esque rip off. Just lazy. First original movie I saw in cinemas this year, and it was trash. Fantastic.