Cinema Lounge Reviews

When a NPC discovers that he’s actually a character in a video game, he decides to rewrite the rules and make his own story. However, when he is told that his world will be destroyed by a real life player, which happens to be the person who coded him in the first place, he is sent on an adventure of a lifetime to save his world and every NPC within it by taking down the creator of the game, Antwan.

Ryan Reynolds stars in this absolutely hilarious adventure about a boring bank teller NPC called Guy in a open-world video game whose stuck in this endless cycle of wake up, go to work, go home, sleep and then wake up again everyday of his life. But somehow, Reynolds still manages to make his character Guy that much more enjoyable by giving it that ‘Ryan Reynolds’ style that we all know him for and is defiantly a must watch for anyone whose a fan of him. Anyone who has followed his work before will know that he’s known for giving comedy-action movies a fresh taste and I’ve got to say that his original take on his work is portrayed flawlessly here in Free Guy and you probably won’t find it any better elsewhere.

There’s only one more to describe this film really, and that’s too much to remember. But in a good way. There’s endless references to other popular movies, video games and music which you’ll recognise and have a laugh at. However that’s not all, something which surprised me to see was the many cameos by famous gaming YouTubers and streamers with the likes of DanTDM, Pokimane, Ninja and more than I can remember which was fantastic to see and did fit within the overall genre of the movie but I’m still not too sure how I feel about it. For the younger viewers, which this film is more than suitable for, it will be a huge pleasant surprise to see their favourites make an appearance as these are the people who they watch on a daily basis and are growing up with. On the other hand, I understand why they included these small cameos and they totally fitted right in with the overall feel of the film but personally for me and possibly some of the other teens out there, this could come across as a little cringey from time to time.

On a more positive note, Free Guy is a proper comedic adventure and definitely one for the gaming community out there. We’ve had video game based movies in the past such as the 2018 film Ready Player One, which was a fantastic production and still one of my all time favourites to this day, but unlike Ready Player One Free Guy doesn’t through everything at you at once and takes a more laidback approach to things making it easier to understand and more enjoyable overall. And like all video game movies, the CGI is unreal and almost makes you want to play in its world.

Finally I’ve got to talk about Taika Waititi’s performance. Just one word, amazing. He managed to deliver an impressive, unique comedic style to his acting in Free Guy and worked perfectly well with his character Antwan. Every time he came on screen you couldn’t help but laugh along at every scene as that what his character made you do. In a way, its the sort of style he used back when he voiced Korg in Thor: Ragnarok but on a whole new level. I think its because his voice and accent works extremely well with everything he says in the film. Not only him but the amount of stars that had a part in this film was incredibly such as Dwayne Johnson, Chris Evans and Channing Tatum which you wouldn’t know about without either doing some research first or by watching the movie.