Bought and Sold Guy
Another day, another new American movie written by Communists. 2021's Free Guy uses a fictional MMORPG to tell a story of the working class rising up against a capitalist oppressor. Despite the genre of "video games meeting reality" being pretty well worn at this point, Free Guy does inject some new ideas into the formula and is one of the few movies of its kind that actually feels like it was written by gamers who have some acquaintance with how the business often works, at least from the point of view of gamers. Unfortunately, the film's interesting ideas are connected by a web of ill-conceived plot points and the ending makes no sense either on a literal level or in terms of theme or emotion. Ryan Reynolds stuck in perpetual sarcasm mode is miscast as a protagonist meant to be peculiarly innocent and the usually amusing Taika Waititi is wasted a villain who's little more than a lazy caricature.
Reynolds plays Guy, aka "Blue Shirt Guy", an NPC who gains human level intelligence. The MMORPG is based on code from a simulator designed by Millie (Jodie Comer) and Walter (Joe Keery). Taika Waititi's character, Antwan, now the CEO of gaming giant Soonami, stole the code from them and Millie plays the game looking for evidence of this that she can use in a lawsuit. This is how Guy sees her in game and instantly falls in love with her. It's this initial inspiration that leads him down a path of self-discovery that breaks him out of his NPC routine.
I like the idea of genuine artificial intelligence spontaneously emerging from an NPC population of a game. It reminded me of watching NPCs in certain Bethesda games, particularly Oblivion with its "radient AI" designed to give the NPCs self-motivated actions and problem solving. Often times, the results were unintentionally hilarious and fascinating. Free Guy doesn't quite capture that, Guy always seems more like he's Amish than artificial, his weirdness just coming from the fact that he's perpetually polite in a world where gamers are encouraged to be rampaging psychopaths.
The film unambiguously condemns this culture, seemingly arguing it's jerks like Antwan who create this environment that fosters the kind of trolls who want to run around shooting people all the time. The conclusion is that people naturally just prefer to passively watch AI denizens living their lives. The fact that this is a multi-million dollar film designed to attract audiences with action sequences is just one way in which the film plainly lacks self-awareness and its argument looks naive and trite.
A video game character breaking out of its mould is basically the concept of Wreck-It Ralph, where it's much better delivered and unimpaired by having to also be a manifesto for a poorly conceived Communist fantasy. At one point, the NPCs in Free Guy go on strike, a move which lacks the drama of a strike in which workers are forced to go without their means of sustenance--for themselves and their families. The NPCs also have no reason to fear any harmful repercussions for their actions--Antwan's trying to destroy them either way. In reality, a smart businessman would likely be looking for ways to profit from having the first genuine artificial intelligence living in his own MMORPG.
Even the film's romantic subplot doesn't work. It introduces a thought about the nature of free will in spontaneous emotion that it doesn't follow up on. I suspect, like the AI in Oblivion that causes NPCs to randomly run around naked or throw baskets, the screenwriters didn't really understand what they were doing.
Free Guy is available on Disney+ in most countries.