“Free Guy” and the Feel Good Genre

I’d have to be a cold-hearted bastard not to like “Free Guy”, a movie so well-intentioned and so very competently executed that there has to be some kind of psychological threshold metric that if you don’t hit it, you’re are quite simply a sociopath.

While “The Suicide Squad” is more my Big Summer Fun Movie jam, I will gleefully admit that I have an appreciable love of movies that are charming, funny, and end happily. To that end, I can honestly say I really enjoyed “Free Guy” and am pleasantly surprised that it turned out better than I expected.

Boasting show runners and cast members from “Stranger Things”, Jodie Comer from “Killing Eve” and Ryan Reynolds out charming himself and Taika Watiiti walking off with every scene he’s in, it’s hard to resist the movie’s charms. 

A mixture of  a less-congested and jumbled “Ready Player One” (with which it shares  screenwriter Zak Penn) and “The Truman Show” but with less angst and existential questioning, “Free Guy” hits its marks, delivers its lines, and recedes into the memory slot for pleasant, undemanding flicks. 

This isn’t to say that “Free Guy” isn’t without a degree of thematic richness or that it is only fluff, though it does veer near to that zone of “forgettable cotton candy”, but there is enough meat on the bones of the script and in its execution to make it memorable. There are plenty of scenes and moments that have stuck with me in the past few days that speak to how well it carried out the mission statement.

If it sounds like I’m discussing a corporate project, well, that’s the other side of commercial confectionary like this. It’s a slick bit of work, polished but not soulless, and achieves its goals of providing a tight story with enough turns, if not twists, to keep people involved in the plot. And again, performances by professionals across the board.

By now, the plot is probably well enough known via the trailer: Guy is a Non-Player Character (NPC) in a video game whose core AI script is finally working and he is the first of the NPCs in the game to achieve free will and sentience in the context of his video game world. Waititi plays the devious Antwan who runs Soonami, the company that owns the game developed by Joe Keery’s Keys and Jodie Comer’s Millie, acquired apparently legitimately but using parts of the code base illegally (or at least, duplicitly). Millie walked and Keys stayed on to work in the call center fielding complaints and troubleshooting game play issues. 

As happens with flicks like this, that last bit makes extremely little sense, but without it, the hacking and support Keys is called on to give Millie wouldn’t work and Antwan’s showdown with Keys wouldn’t likely happen. Fortunately, Keery is able to sell Keys’ motivations and we can overlook the preposterousness of not taking a multimillion payday, and moving on to develop your own AI generated game independently. 

To anyone who has watched “Killing Eve”, Comer comes as no surprise, but she is a true revelation here as both Millie’s avatar MolotovGirl in Free City where the game takes place and as Millie herself. She has serious heavy lifting to do in sharing scenes with Ryan Reynolds who brings different shadings to his nice guy persona. I don’t know that there is anyone who is so deserving of trademarking the word “nice”, if not Blake Lively’s husband. That’s not a dig, I find the two of them hugely entertaining and Reynolds’ self-awareness has kept worse films from tanking…”Green Lantern” aside. And “X-Men: Origins”…And..oh, never mind. The point is that he’s on his game here and brings more to Guy than vacuous niceness. 

As the AI grows more mature, Guy discovers a rich inner world of emotional connection and you see this in other NPCs, particularly his buddy Buddy (played by a seriously game Lil Rel Lowery). Without a strong scene partner, the Reynolds’ cuteness could overwhelm or flatten out the bounce of the narrative. As with any good light entertainment, there is little necessity for going hunting for thematic richness or auteur-driven plot devices. 

Levy directs with great economy and trusts his actors to deliver, which they do. I was happy to see Matty Cardarople as a 22-year-old gamer whose avatar is Channing Tatum (also ridiculously funny once Guy has been taken off in the gaming world as a new approach to playing) and Utkarsh Ambudkar as Mouser, Keery’s partner at the call center and Antwan’s almost-lackey bring their best to two characters that could have been far more one-note.

But again, it’s Taika Waititi who just walks away with every scene he’s in, the exception being his showdown with Comer toward the film’s end, where it’s very much a two-hander of equals. Waititi and Reynolds function very much as bookends of personal charm and thematic opposites balancing out the narrative tension, such as it is, in the film’s plotting. 

Without going into detail, suffice it to say that over the course of not quite two hours, the pop cultural references, the Boston locations, the made-for-3D effects, and cameos add up to satisfying happy ending. There are no super high stakes and there is enough rom-com chemistry between Keery and Comer to keep you rooting for all to end well. It does, and I left with a dopey smile on my face.

When I saw the trailers for the film before its release was going to be delayed repeatedly by COVID, I assumed it would be silly but marginally clever and the conceit was intriguing enough to perk my ears up. That I feel like I got more than that is icing on the cake. 

It also got me thinking about a kind of broader genre of “Feel Good Movies”. My first thoughts went to Pixar and Disney, but also to rom-coms and quirky character flicks that rarely demand more than your attention for the time the movie is running and then dissolve cotton candy-like into the memory hole. 

This also reminded me, though, that not all “Feel Goods” are created equal. Much of Pixar’s (and Disney’s for that matter) output are often richer and more evocative (if not provocative) than lighter fare like “Free Guy”. Rom-coms are often painfully insipid and rarely rise to anything as engaging as those movies. 

Reynolds has said in interviews that he just wanted to make a movie that people would walk out of smiling. I totally get it, and he succeeded. There is a definite place for movies like this, particularly in times fraught with division like ours. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that a film like this lands with more weight now than if it had been released a year ago as originally scheduled. Does this detract from the movie’s success? I don’t think so. Had I seen this in a less troubled period, I think I still would have liked it as much. Come to think of it, had it been released last year pre-COVID, we were still living in a pretty ugly period.

Coming up soon, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” is going to be see limited rerelease. It’s amazing that it came out at the end of August twenty years ago, about two weeks before another dark period descended on the country. I don’t think we can draw any hard and fast inferences about the rise of successful “happy movies” as corollaries to desperate historical periods, though. 

The Sound Era saw movies boom in the aftermath of the ’29 Wall Street Crash and throughout the Depression, there was no lack of funny and even uplifting films. Similarly, you can point to successive eras where this has been the case. In other words, movies whose primary raison d’être is to entertain and lighten the emotional load, so to speak, are going to happen regardless of time period. 

There is always time for more serious works and even more aesthetically demanding comedies and romances; but sometimes, you don’t need a great bottle of champagne. A milkshake will do just fine.