VGFlicks: Free Guy (Part 4)

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4

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.

Dude, (I can call him that, that's literally his name),
your face doesn't fit your body.

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.

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.

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..."

Hulk Arm VS Captain America's Shield. Sure, why not.

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.

"I'm here in Boston for the filming of Defending Jacob for
Apple Tv+, having a coffee break and trying to put the Cap
behind me once and for all, and I still get the reminders of
that role! Dammit!"

Dude prepares a red Hulk fist to kill Guy, but our hero retrieves his glasses and summons Captain America’s shield from his inventory, with the Avengers theme blaring in the background. Cue a cameo of Chris Evans watching the fight and cussing, because most of his post-Endgame roles had him be a potty mouth. Guy strikes back with a green Hulk fist of his own… and follows it up with a lightsaber. Cue theme, and Dude getting a beating.

I get it, the lightsaber represents another major geek property.
But its presence here is not gonna make me care any more
about Star Wars.

You sure you want to give Dude a quick way to travel
to you, Guy? Also, that Dude-shaped hole
in the ceiling. Real cartoon stuff.

I hate that I could be saying the same thing here that I was saying about Space Jam: A New Legacy about using the stuff from other movies to bank on nostalgia and take attention away from this one, but the differences here are that A) those franchises don’t all belong to a single studio, so I can’t dump on Disney for this (well… maybe a little, because Marvel and Star Wars, sure); B) some of these fit well as homages to famous games; and C) I can’t say it’s unreasonable that these all appear in the same fictional video game because, again, Fortnite is a thing and it’s collecting franchises like I used to collect trading cards.

Glasses look nice on you, Dude.

Hell, the llama pickaxe appears here! And a gravity gun from Half-Life. Guy’s even got a Portal Gun of his own. None of this helps when he ends up tackled by Dude, with the giant pressing onto his ribcage. He’s losing health, and even with Buddy throwing his glasses at Guy, there’s nothing in the inventory to help… until he gets an idea, and puts the glasses themselves on Dude. The brute becomes distracted by the HUD and the trinkets that appear all over the place, and lets go of Guy to chase them. He really is a dummy.

Bridge Run

Hopefully they can outrun the destruction!

You can, in fact, destroy an entire world with an axe.

Guy invites Buddy to run with him across the bridge and to the invisible island. Meanwhile, Keys, being escorted out, spots Antwan and Mouser heading to the servers room. The CEO has decided to take extreme measures to prevent his secret from being found. Smash everything with an axe kind of extreme. When Mouser asks about this, the truth comes out, and the employee finally turns around to back his friend, also getting escorted out. Antwan swings at every server, one after the other.

This is exactly how I would want to watch a virtual world
falling apart during a movie's climax. This is so freaking
awesome and scary to watch, all at once.

Guy and Buddy turn around to see Free City dissolving into code behind them. The NPCs left behind flee from the streets that are crumbling away, with the unlucky ones not outpacing the destruction getting dusted, Thanos-style – the survivors find refuge at the top floor of a building near the beach, while everything else disappears, even revealing the game’s skybox. The bridge is disintegrating behind Guy and Buddy, so they run.

*sobs uncontrollably* He! Was! Supposed! To! Be!
The! Comic! Relief! Dammit!

Winner winner!

They get far, but as the bridge begins to collapse into data, the friends end up split by a break. Buddy can’t jump across; it’s over for him, but he’s happy he got this far, he who was so reticent to break out of his program. The guy is a comic relief, yet he still gets the most heartfelt moments. Beautiful, no notes. He’s vaporized, and Guy turns around and runs to the edge. He jumps, right as he’s glitching away… and lands onto a green field. His presence on the island causes the invisibility code to dissipate, revealing it to the NPCs… and to the world watching.

He's still got that axe. I'd be terrified to come close to
Antwan, even knowing he wouldn't be so stupid as to
attack someone else with it.

Keys had warned Millie in advance, so she rushes into Soonami Studios to confront Antwan in the servers room, where there’s only one left. Man, the coincidences here. ♪♫Artistic license!!♪♫ She reveals that Guy made it to the island, which guarantees that she’d win her lawsuit; with nothing left to lose, Antwan is ready to destroy the last remains of Free City if it means Millie loses everything she and Keys have worked on. But she doesn’t want money; she just wants the world of Life Itself. She’s willing to let him keep part of the code, all the licensing rights for Free City, and all the money from those sales, if she gets to keep her game.

Love Letter

Well well well, if it isn't the consequences of his actions!

Antwan took Millie’s deal, and went on with the launch of Free City 2. However, the clusterfuck of the final days of Free City, combined with the rushed release of the sequel (with buggy code and sucky multiplayer), means he’s pretty much done. Millie and Keys have complete ownership of Life Itself, renamed Free Life, and even hired Mouser. If you ask me, Mouser got off easy after everything he’s done, but it IS true that he did all those antagonistic actions while believing a lie… but his friendship with Keys is genuine, so he was salvageable that way at least

Due to the massive audience that witnessed the reveal of the island and the birth of the true first artificial intelligence Free Life is getting more traffic than the mini-studio can handle! Allow me to be mean and say like Antwan here, sadly; this is a fantasy ending that would not have happened without the film’s events. Life Itself would have struggled badly to find an audience otherwise; people play games for the interactivity, not to just watch something. A paradise world where characters with hyper-advanced AI grow and become sentient together does sounds interesting, but you’d have to keep track of the interesting events in the NPCs’ lives. Missed one? You just had to be there. That’s why I suggested interactions with players. It would require intense moderation to ensure real world visitors don’t introduce harmful stuff (We wouldn't want another Tay), but it could help these NPCs develop far more – Guy attained sentience by meeting a real-life person! And that’s why I suggested an Animal Crossing-style idea; it would make for a chill experience.

Mouser ships 'em. He knows what's up. Also nice of him
to nonverbally tell Keys to declare his love to Millie.

If the programmer cannot confess, the program will do it
for him!

Mouser tries to get Keys to declare his love for Millie, but Keys gives up and goes to get coffee for the team. Meanwhile, Millie brings molotovGirl to Free Life, and has a farewell talk with Guy. He’s there with the other NPCs, Dude included. Hey, just because he was a bad guy, doesn’t mean he’s a bad… guy. Guy admits that he knows he can’t be with Millie; but also, that he was coded as looking for love, and for whom the perfect partner was someone like Millie. And who coded him? Keys, of course. Guy is a living love letter. The second half of Keys’ video, which she hadn’t seen yet, confirms it all.

Major mid-street reunion happy endings!
*sobs some more*

She runs out to catch Keys at the coffee shop and they reunite, getting their romcom ending. Meanwhile, Guy reunites with friend Buddy, who has reappeared! And now, they don’t have routines. They can do anything they want. Roll credits!

Final words

There's always that one guy that puts on the most
ridiculous player skin, just because he can.

This is one of my favorite video game movies, ever. Top 3, easily. It understands and portrays video games, online communities, game development, and AAA studios in a way that I’ve seldom seen any other video game movie do before. Of course, many artistic liberties are taken since the plot, at its core, is pure what if? science-fiction, with an AI growing sentient in a place where we wouldn’t ever expect it. The game in this movie can’t be too realistic either, but its details get a LOT right, not just in features and in gameplay, but also in player and AI behaviors. And it takes full advantage of its setting of Free City, as well as the context around Soonami Studios, for a compelling and interesting story that throws in a bit of romance on top of it all.

There are huge Truman Show undertones to this entire
story. Except it's everyone living in Free City that doesn't
know about the entertainment nature of their world.

At the center of it is Ryan Reynolds playing a very silly character – as usual, but instead of focusing on vulgarity or snarkiness, a lot of Guy is about being average and completely oblivious to real life, only deviating after the inciting event and as he evolves from breaking his routine. He never goes full Deadpool, but he becomes full-fledged and complex. The rest of the cast is great too – Lil Rey Howery as Buddy, the character easy to dismiss as a comic relief but who ends up delivering the most emotional scenes. And outside of the game, Jodie Comer, Joe Keery (Keys and Millie have excellent chemistry), Utkarsh Ambudkar, and of course, we can’t forget Taika Waititi as Antwan, one of the funniest assholes I’ve seen in film, pathetic yet dangerous all at once. So many fun cameos, both voice-only and on-screen appearances, as well.

I do enjoy the aspect of YouTubers discussing the events.
This entire thing with Blue Shirt Guy may not seem like
such a big deal... but then again, when have we content
creators not taken something unexpected in a game and
made three hundred videos about it?

A movie that spends so much of its runtime within a multiplayer video game would need the special effects to back that up, and boy does it deliver. Like the CGI-animated bits when we see the game’s actual graphics through a screen. And within the game itself, there’s always a ton of things to spot. Be it gameplay elements, details one can see in the HUD when it’s seen through Guy’s glasses, or all the player characters and scenes going on in the background, like roaming tanks or player characters doing silly stuff. There’s always “something” to notice. The two scenes of a developer going God Mode are awesome, even if short, and the action scenes with gaming tropes added in are just, mwah, cherry on the sundae.

Sure, the suspension of disbelief gets stretched in a couple
of places, but I also think the movie gets enough right
about everything to ignore those exaggerations.

I will admit that the climax of the movie, the battle with Dude in particular, leans a little too heavily on references to other properties, which slightly robs the film of originality; look, I get it, that’s the Fortnite gag in the film. Free City is always compared to GTA and Fortnite, and the latter mostly due to all the pieces from other games that are referenced. This really is my biggest issue, because everything else (barring a few awkward lines here and there) is so spot-on. The further into the story we go, the more artistic liberties are taken, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. You’ll get far more out of this one if you also bathe in online gaming, the communities, and everything around that, since it requires a decent frame of reference to be fully understood.

In short: Yeah! I strongly recommend this one!

Hm… I’ve gone overboard. Tell you what, this coming Friday, I’m starting a new theme month. See, I had the genius idea of buying Yu-Gi-Oh!’s Early Days Collection last year… and now that’s added some 14 more games to my backlog. How about we clear a few in March?