Free Guy

Un buen crossover Disney de El show de Truman (Una vida en directo) y Tron con una buena dosis de romance y acción en la línea de Ready Player One. Un reparto agradable, bien coloreado, con elementos clichés típicamente simpáticos y algunas buenas ideas. Solo que el esqueleto dramatúrgico, con las motivaciones de los personajes y las razones por las que suceden las cosas, son un poco meh. Pero ese es mi problema, quiero que una película así sea lógica y que todo tenga sentido. (12.08.2021)

Game character Ryan Reynolds has become sentient and decided to do good, and that can have far-reaching consequences in the game. This action comedy relies on a combination of wild action, slightly wacky humor, a bunch of pop culture references, a very plucky hero and an unexpectedly positive atmosphere. It's fun to watch. (14.08.2021)

Ready Free Guy One! The surprise of the summer and Shawn Levy at his best! I tipped Free Guy at around 60% before the premiere, and I'm really happy that it turned out to be an unexpected hit that will please all the nerds, fanboys and gameboys who grew up on GTA – this target audience will be the most excited, but the rest will have fun too. Ryan Reynolds is in his best role since Deadpool and fits in really well here – I think he took his performance here up another level. The film has a likeable world and story, an interesting plot, with countless ideas and references that had me thinking, this must have been thought up by a genius. Most of the game's Easter eggs are fun (Trolls exists ?), and the Marvel references must be making the rounds in memes all over the internet by now, because they had the whole cinema laughing. Apart from the playful and awesome visuals, the excellent and clear action, the leads have great chemistry, and the romantic line is warmly delivered. By the end I was literally crying with so much emotion that I could have sunk the Titanic with my tears. And then there is the shocking final twist (there are other twists, of course, but the final one had me on all fours, almost crawling out of the cinema). I was expecting a silly and entertaining movie, but I got the full package with everything and the big screen suits it. I enjoyed the whole two hours, and Taika Waititi as the bad guy was awesome. Story 4/5, Action 5/5, Humor 4/5, Violence 0/5, Fun 5/5 Music 4/5, Visuals 5/5, Atmosphere 4/5, Suspense 4/5, Emotion 4/5. 9/10. (17.08.2021)

Free Guy is Tron: Legacy strained through the sieve of Idiocracy, but instead of satarising bullshit, it gives the illusion of freedom with an ingratiating corporate smile. Free Guy shows the absurd degradation of the ideals of cyberpunk into a mediocre tale for a generation weaned on social-media myths about the exclusivity and brilliance of every individual. The film’s messianic romance, financed by the mega-corporation Disney, which is something that William Gibson never dreamed of, performs a diversion manoeuvre in the form of a cartoonish villain, while shoving prefabricated illusions, bought-off YouTube stars and its own bling down the throats of its adolescent target audience. It is also starting to be sad how Ryan Reynolds is becoming a slave to his doggedly constructed image as a bad-boy nerd as he begins to embody the cliché of 40-somethings playing young men chasing after would-be broad-minded women in their twenties. (28.11.2021)

A pleasant relax movie. A multi-player game of GTA filmed with real people with the message that you can do whatever you want that rides on Reynolds’ crazy humor and wild action scenes. The laid-back, optimistic atmosphere isn’t what I would have expected in the world of Grand Theft Auto, but I enjoyed it. Waititi’s villain must have seemed like a really exaggerated caricature, but he delivers in style... (28.09.2021)

Finally, someone found the balls to film GTA in all its glory and put together some healthy sophisticated romance onto it with nonchalant elegance. A great portion of fun, which is a bit hurt by the dodgy visuals and uneven pace, but it is reliably compensated by a well of great directorial ideas and the traditionally fun Reynolds. (29.09.2021)

La mejor oportunidad de éxito de Free Guy es entre los jugadores de juegos de ordenador de unos diez años en adelante, que idealmente juegan a GTA y Fortnite, y que seguro que estarán súper felices. Por lo demás, es una comedia de acción a medio hacer con Ryan Reynolds en todos los sentidos, con una acción sólida pero fácil de olvidar, un componente cómico por debajo de la media (las referencias a la cultura pop y los cameos no garantizan un chiste por sí solos, y el intento de líneas finales falla), y una historia esquemática remendada a partir de motivos que se han visto muchas veces antes y mejor. A diferencia de El show de Truman (Una vida en directo), Free Guy no trabaja con ningún nivel satírico o idea más profunda, al lado de Ready Player One parece su pariente mucho más pobre y menos imaginativo en cuanto a contenido, y su nivel general está más cerca de la nueva Jumanji, con la que también comparte incoherencias y ambigüedades en las reglas de su propio mundo ficticio y la ambición de entretener sólo casualmente y no intentar ir más allá. En este sentido, Free Guy como entretenimiento ligero de acción veraniega se sostiene gracias, entre otras cosas, a un aspecto técnico competente, un tema simpático sobre la vida de los personajes NPC del juego y un reparto agradable. Sin embargo, se realiza de una forma que ni siquiera se acerca a explotar su rico potencial, con el resultado de que allí donde Free Guy quiere ser fatal, compleja y absolutamente absorbente, se queda a medias, superficial y, en general, ordinaria. (15.08.2021)

The atmosphere of Ready Player One visibly radiates from Free Guy, and even though Spielberg's film was much more playful and polished, “Guy” still has its appeal and manages to entertain, thrill, and even move a little bit during its nearly two-hour running time. The film's premise is certainly engaging and despite a few minor quibbles, I was satisfied with its execution. Like RPO, there are more than a few pop culture references and humorous innuendos, especially provided by the main character, Guy. At times the plot was so bizarre that I wondered if Taika Waititi (Antwan) had a hand in the script, while at the same time it felt like a PG-13 version of Deadpool here and there. Ryan Reynolds is a likeable guy and the hitherto virtually unknown Jodie Comer provided a great second to him. Waititi was perhaps a little too theatrical, but whatever. The point about the (un)importance of the individual and the equal chances for each of us was a bit too on the nose, but nicely delivered. (28.08.2021)

I like The Matrix comparison a lot, because it illustrates the transformation of the perception of pretty similar themes. The Matrix is about the problem of disconnection from an oppressive system, Free Guy is a film primarily about adapting to oppression and ultimately defends the artificial system. It pretends to be an anti-capitalist fable, with the antagonist, the evil businessman, ultimately being punished by the invisible hand of the market. Similarly, it pretends to be a film about the need to break free from repetitive mechanisms, but in the end it merely replaces them with other repetitive mechanisms. And no, it's not a conscious thing. It offers all this with the white-knuckled grin of a podcaster trying to sell you his Kickstarter project with artificial enthusiasm. Cyberpunk dystopia has been around for a long time, and it's pretty faithful to its predecessors. Yet they still failed to appreciate that such a reality would look not like decimated metropoles but like ubiquitous sunny franchises full of coolness and camaraderie, because they apparently didn't think to work with the powers of marketing capitalism at all. Thus, twenty years after young directors succeeded in making prescient science fiction about how humans are unable to disconnect from the system through which machines have discovered, among other things, that the human condition is defined through suffering, we are faced with a conformist blah film shot like a Starbucks commercial that tries hysterically to pretend how fresh and young it is. Except it's devotee shit from a 50-year-old director with a 45-year-old protagonist, made for the assured man-children on whom the whole system rests and whose idea of resistance is Movember and dry February. Oh, and it's 80% on Rotten Tomatoes. So shoot yourself immediately. (09.11.2021)

Since my motor skills aren't what they used to be I spend most of my days watching movies and (who knew?) playing online games. So Free Guy was just the perfect thing for me. In the game I'm currently playing the most, NPCs don't get eliminated, so I didn't have to feel guilty and could have a lot of fun watching Guy's fate. It wasn’t hard to enjoy this movie, because the writing wasn't bad at all, the cast was multicultural but the choices made sense, the dialogue wasn’t dumb, and Dude had the best unscripted lines I've ever heard. It would have deserved five stars if it hadn't been for the clumsy romance that slowed down the pace and the inspirational speeches followed by typically American "spontaneous" applause. (01.01.2022)