As a film writer, I believe it is important to acknowledge when you are wrong. When you make enough predictions on an industry that feeds off speculation, you’re bound to miss the mark every once in a while. I’m still reeling from standing behind Josh Trank’s Fantastic Four all the way through production, only to result in what is arguably the most misguided and poorly made big budget superhero film since Batman & Robin (seriously, Fantastic Four’s only redeeming quality is that it can be used to show the next generation of filmmakers what a movie looks like when it fails on almost every conceivable level).
And on what may or may not be a related note, if early reactions to Free Guy on social media are to be believed, then I haven’t been so wrong about something since 2015….That’s when Fantastic Four came out. As it happens.
You see, back in late 2019, after the release of the first (and admittedly generic) trailer for Free Guy, the latest release from Canadians Shawn Levy, who directs and produces, and Ryan Reynolds, who plays Guy and also produces, I wrote an article giving my thoughts on the movie, having little hope for its quality, to put it politely. I was quick to judge, even though I did acknowledge there was only a single trailer to go off at the time.
It was initially slated for a July 2020 release, but for obvious reasons it was pushed back several times, eventually settling on its upcoming release date of August 13th. Throughout that time, ever the obnoxious cynic, I held firm in my convictions that Free Guy would be…well, shit! I said it! But after being screened to critics recently, who flocked to social media largely gushing about the movie, I’m now likely going to have to eat shit. Figuratively speaking.
Bear in mind, I’m not the only person caught off guard by these early reactions. Writing on these responses for Total Film, Bradley Russell uses the subtitle “The summer blockbuster has already surprised many”. Even more interesting, though, is the title of Russell’s article, which reads “Free Guy first reactions are in and it “might be the best video game movie ever””. While such a statement should still be taken with an enormous grain of salt, this is not just some throwaway comment cherry-picked from a second-rate publication by TotalFilm for the sake of clicks; this is from a reputable writer and editor-in-chief at Collider, Steven Weintraub, who in the same tweet gave it a “Big thumbs up” after noting that “It actually makes you believe you are in a video game.”
Now, if we were to get into semantics of what constitutes a “video game movie”, one could argue that it generally refers to an adaptation of a video game, as opposed to a video game-themed movie that is an IP all of its own. I for one would argue that Free Guy lifts enough concepts from a variety of video game genres to earn the distinction alongside the likes of Sonic the Hedgehog and Detective Pikachu (which, as it happens, features Reynolds voicing Pikachu).
Its validity in the genre is justified by its storyline alone, which centres on an NPC (or non-playable character) named Guy, played by Reynolds, who unwittingly lives in an open-world video game. However, when its creator Antwan (Taika Waititi) seeks to destroy Guy’s world, a programmer named Millie (Jodie Comer) enters it and finds him, opening his eyes to the fact that they are in a game, then joining forces in an attempt to stop Antwan and his developers.
Regardless of my previous thoughts, I had always maintained that the premise, at the very least, was an intriguing one, but I was convinced they had squandered it until the release of the early reactions, with one critic from The Nerds of Color going so far as to describe Free Guy as “Tron meets Truman Show”, which is a glowing endorsement if there ever was one. I have rarely been so happy to apparently be so wrong, as it seems the substance I thought Levy’s movie would lack is not only present, but the creatives involved were acutely aware of the nature of the material and the audience they are catering to (something I was also critical of in the initial trailer).
All this being said, I have yet to see Free Guy for myself and the overall consensus might not reflect the limited sampling of positive social media responses. Nonetheless, it is certainly encouraging, especially when Joel Meares, the editor-in-chief at Rotten Tomatoes, who was “extremely skeptical heading into” Free Guy, calls it “One of the freshest-feeling, genuinely funny, and surprisingly moving big-budget adventure movies in years”.
Ryan Reynolds’ last acting collaboration with Taika Waititi in Green Lantern might not have gone down so well, critically or commercially, but I should know better now given their immense successes in the years since.