Review of Free Guy (2021) by Jluis_001 — 14 Aug 2021

It's unapologetically dumb, and I'm quite capable of appreciating a movie that isn't afraid to embrace the complete absurdity, but Free Guy is a movie lacking in tone and direction.

What this film tries to do for its entire duration is to seek to throw as much as it can on the screen in order to make you believe that it's very funny, when in fact it's just repeating itself.

This occurs because after certain situations, pretty much after the first twenty minutes of the story, its arsenal of gags begins to run out severely, so the film begins to fill in the gaps with real-life reactions of some gamers, and news coverage so they can explain you that the character is simply doing something out of the ordinary. As if you weren't already seeing it with your own eyes.

Free Guy is a high-concept idea executed with a defeatist mindset. Why do I say this? Very simple. Its creators and lead actor expect you to be satisfied with just the visuals, so you can forget about the rest.

And it's not that I've tried to find some kind of narrative depth in this film, I'd be fooling myself, but it's a little hard to avoid thinking about it when the lead character, despite his eternal smile, is basically having an existential crisis.

Free Guy is just entertainment. Dumb entertainment, but its ambitions are conscious enough to die there, but it's entertainment that becomes hollow after a while, which is ironic considering the story takes place in an open-world video game, and those games need a huge amount of variants to not bore the player.

The presence of Ryan Reynolds playing himself for the umpteenth time, stopped being enough for me quite a while ago.