Free Guy (2021) The funniest part of our muli-plex experience watching this movie came from the 30 second Dolby Stereo clip that preceded it........
In that little bit of film, the Dolby folks took us through a lovely sound safari through the leafy branches of a tree.......though which we could hear the delicate rustling of the foliage and even the breeze lightly windmilling a stray detached falling leaf.......
Thus ended the more subtle audio portion of the presentation.
Once the fanfare ended the 20th Century Fox logo (a company already gobbled up by Disney), "Free Guy" commenced, taking place inside a video game city modeled after the one in the "Grand Theft Auto" game.
And even we casual observers of video game lore knew what to expect here......a city in which the anonymous, disposable residents are continually besieged by psychotic bank robbers, raging supervillains and assorted lethal terrorists......all of these assailants equipped with enough firepower to invade another Middle East hellhole.
(So instead of gentle falling leaves, the Dolby soundtrack now features a continual 115 minutes of explosions and heavy caliber weapon fire.....making us consider a trip to the snack bar to ask for hot buttered Tylenol......)
Ryan Reynolds, doing his best cheerful goofball routine, plays 'Guy', one of the game's many expendable NPC's (Non-Playing characters), essentially a stick figure used to populate the digital landscape with random city dwellers......
Except he's not random any longer. His very clever game creators (Joe Keery, Jodie Comer) have, to their own stunning surprise, gifted him with free will and a mind of his own.....making him the first artificially intelligent entity in a video game.
Suddenly lovestruck by Jodie Comer's game avatar Molotov Girl, Reynolds becomes a front-and-center character in 'Free City', confounding the game's worldwide online players as well as the manic videogame mogul Antwan (writer-director Taika Waititi, overacting as if he stepped out of 'The Lego Movie')
Without question, it's all funny, clever stuff and it never lets up for close to 2 hours.......which also becomes the film's biggest problem.
It's just too much of a good thing.......and it pounds away at you long long after all its satirical points have been made repeatedly.......if it had only been about 20 minutes or so shorter, we might have even loved it to death.
But it's designed to exist as a multi-plex spectacle, hurling out a non-stop assault of eye-popping digital effects and ear-splitting sounds........(we suppose we should thank God it wasn't some kind of 160 minute director's cut......)
We did perk up for the film's grand finale, tossing off pop culture gags in rapid succession.....(a far better way of juicing up the movie as compared to that tedious, laborious homage to "The Shining" that permeated Spielberg's "Ready Player One")
Through the years, we've never, ever understood Hollywood's periodic infatuation with making films based on video games......(the results were predictably soulless, rotten and unwatchable......trying sitting through any more than a few minutes of "Super Mario Brothers").
But we'll hand this much to "Free Guy"....... by using all the current CGI technology to aggressively lampoon the gaming universe, its players and creators, it gave us loud, mostly fun afternoon at the movies.
A little too long, maybe, but then we've learned to deal with sensory overkill at the multi-plex as a fact of life. 3 stars (***).....but pardon us if we still long for the days when a film's primary special effects were the actors' performances in a story well told.......
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