Guy VS Dude
God damn, that section title alone is making me crack up.
The bridge is built, all the player characters are gone, and Guy will be free to cross the water towards the island of Life Itself. Keys, on his way out of Soonami, activates a program on his laptop that activates livestreaming to every screen that was playing Free City. The whole world will be watching this climax.
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Dude, (I can call him that, that's literally his name),
your face doesn't fit your body. |
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The world, including the game's biggest streamers, are
watching the Reynolds VS Reynolds battle. |
Meanwhile, Dude’s upload has completed. He is introduced punching Guy in the face. Dude was the work of Antwan, when he was remaking Blue Shirt Guy so
Free City 2 could capitalize on the bank teller’s sudden popularity. The end result is, of course, not Guy at all. A buff bodybuilder (the body of Aaron W. Reed) with a blue shirt tattoo on the left pec, blond hair, and Guy’s face shoved where a face should be. Like a deepfake that doesn’t quite convince. And it looks like Antwan put all his efforts into the looks, because Dude is a complete dummy. His catchphrase is “Catchphrase!” and his speech lines are incomplete. He’s ridiculous and scary at the same time. In short, he fits right in within a movie that stars Ryan Reynolds.
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We see plenty of scenes from the game itself. Especially
as the climax is livestreamed to the world. We are, however,
never explained how the game, with nobody playing it, has
camera angles that change so the world can watch properly. |
A quick thing I haven’t mentioned yet: Not only are we getting the live-action movie, but anytime we’re watching through a real-life player’s screen, we ARE seeing the same events in CGI, with the same level of detail as we’ve gotten accustomed to with stuff like
GTA or
Fortnite – these scenes had to be animated too! It’s one of the things we don’t quite think about when watching it, because in the story, these scenes are from a video game – but there had to be a TON of work to make all the players and NPCs look exactly like they do when the inside of the game is shown to us in live-action.
Dude punches Guy away, causing our hero to lose his glasses. However, Buddy comes by to help Guy! But Buddy is suddenly very interested in Dude. And starts playing with the Dude’s pecs, causing the latter to punch Buddy to the ground. He falls next to Guy, and then Dude picks him up again to toss him away, before giving his doppelganger Guy a beating. …Yes, I am using these characters’ silly basic names repeatedly on purpose.
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I try to imagine Shawn Levy directing this bit. "Okay Aaron,
you gotta let Lil Rey Howery play with your pecs while he
acts like he has never seen anything like them. For an
uncomfortable twenty seconds. 3... 2..." |
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Hulk Arm VS Captain America's Shield. Sure, why not.
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A key element is that
Free City contains tons of nods to other franchises and video games. The hidden signification is that Antwan is incapable of creating something himself, so he takes whatever he can and shoves those things in his games. Who cares if they don’t fit. However, we are never told why all these things are still allowed to appear in the game; is Soonami striking deals with other studios and franchise owners to get the rights to add these things in? I mean, what’s next, a game that has characters from literally everything out there, like
KPop Demon Hunters,
Regular Show,
The Office,
Adventure Time,
South Park,
Harry Potter (AGAIN!!),
Danny Phantom,
The Simpsons,
Scooby-Doo, Gorillaz- I’mma stop the joke there, we all know I’m talking about
Fortnite by now. In hindsight, the numerous additions to
Fortnite feel like they were predicted by
Free Guy and the number of video game references that make their way into the film. Earlier, Guy is seen using a Mega Buster from
Mega Man.
