The movie Free Guy comes to theaters on August 12. Deadpool actor Ryan Reynolds plays an NPC in a virtual gaming world based on games like GTA V and Fortnite. The film has received positive reviews from critics.
Here’s what Free Guy is about: Guy is just an ordinary guy who works in a bank. Every day he gets up in the morning, feeds his goldfish, and heads to work. What he doesn’t know is that he is actually an NPC in an online game called Free City, which exists solely to entertain its players.
Free City is a colorful mix of games like GTA V, Fortnite, and PayDay 2. Accordingly, every day there are robberies, heists, shootouts, and wild chases happening, but that is normal for Guy. He doesn’t know anything different.
Day in and day out, he experiences the same events and robberies until one day he decides to stand up to one of the robbers. He manages to defeat the player character and take off his glasses, which literally opens his eyes. Through the glasses, Guy can see what the city around him really looks like: filled with quest markers, health boosts, EXP and HP indicators. This drastically changes his life, and he decides to use his newfound knowledge to perform good deeds in Free City.
Here’s what the positive reviews say: On the major film review site rottentomatoes, the film has received a score of 86% from a total of 98 reviews and thus receives the “Fresh” rating. Many critics agree that Ryan Reynolds does a great job in his role as Guy.
His performance is refreshingly different from his known roles like Deadpool and contributes greatly to the warm charm of the film.
[…] The strongest part of “Free Guy” is the natural charisma of its actors. Reynolds can play this kind of charming action hero in his sleep. […]
Brian Tallerico, critic on rottentomatoes
Ryan Reynolds seems to have as much fun with his role as Guy as he did in Deadpool and Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard. He is great in these roles […] and has the charisma to deliver the dramatic scenes effectively.
Avi Offer, critic on rottentomatoes
Overall, the film is considered a nice comedy by a large part of the critics, packed with countless pop and gaming culture references, memes, allusions, and cameos from well-known personalities from the gaming world. Even if some of them are hopelessly outdated, such as Wrecking Ball by Miley Cyrus, they still blend into an entertaining comedy-action cocktail.
So, you can expect many “Aha!” moments that will remind you of your own experiences in gaming or online. Many gamers will also nod in agreement at one of the core themes of Free Guy. The film addresses, among other things, the aspect of greed of big publishing companies that are only after profit.
It’s impossible to walk out of this film without a smile on your face. Especially if you’re a gamer.
Briana Lawrence, critic on rottentomatoes
Free Guy is a hilarious, heartwarming, and refreshingly original perspective on the ultra-violent world of gaming. It’s an unexpectedly human journey into a digital domain.
Julian Roman, critic at MovieWeb
Here’s what the negative reviews say: There are also some critics who were not convinced by Free Guy. The humor is described as exaggerated and flat, filled with too many special effects. According to reviews, the film also doesn’t know what it wants to be and throws together too many individual themes like free will, corporate greed, and AI development.
Additionally, Free Guy brings no new ideas to the table but is a kind of mishmash of films like Lego Movie, Matrix, and The Truman Show.
For an “original film,” Free Guy isn’t really very original. It’s a charming mix of clichés cobbled together from other films. But without its own coding.
Jake Coyle, top critic at rottentomatoes
However, the number of negative voices is in the minority, allowing Free Guy to maintain its score of 86%. Well-known films that have similarly performed on rottentomatoes include:
- Kung Fu Panda (87%)
- John Wick (86%)
- The Sixth Sense (86%)
- Mulan (86%)
- Deadpool (85%)
Movies about video games often get terrible reviews
Here are the ratings for video game movies: Since the early days when gaming grew from an “outsider hobby” into a multi-billion-dollar industry, there have been repeated attempts to bring the magic of video games to the big screen. Unfortunately, all of these attempts seemed to be cursed and resulted in often terrible films.
A look at the list of Hollywood films (via wikipedia), based on games, quickly reveals that most of them barely managed to achieve a rating of 40% on rottentomatoes or more than 50 points on Metacritic. Ratings in the low range below 20 are not uncommon, as are single-digit scores.
Films based on games that have received a score of 60% or more can be counted on one hand. Even major movies based on well-known and beloved gaming franchises like Silent Hill (10%) or Assassin’s Creed (18%) fail to break the “curse” of bad video game movies.
These films colored the perception of gaming movies years later and ensured that many new announcements were initially met with skepticism by gamers, as seen with the recent film announcement for the Monster Hunter franchise. The enthusiasm of fans over the announcement was limited.
The situation has improved somewhat in recent years. With Detective Pikachu (68%) and Sonic The Hedgehog (63%), the ratings of gaming movies have seen a significant upward trend compared to earlier films. The Warcraft film, which performed poorly with critics (28%), has pleased some Blizzard fans.
Free Guy seems to continue this positive trend and shows that films about gaming can indeed be really good.
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