I don’t really know what I was expecting when I went into this movie, I did enjoy it, but in some ways I felt like it had been done before, and in this review I will mention lots of movies that reminded me of that, and in some ways I see those as better because they did it first.

Free Guy follows an NPC called Guy who lives in a video game called Free City. The code was stolen by the creator of Free City from a developer who had bigger ambitions for this game. What it was supposed to be was AI could learn and evolve and change and grow, so the game always grew too, whereas the owner of Free City just turned it into any other GTA action-packed gun-shooting game.

In the game Guy meets a player played by Jodie Comer who I absolutely adore as an actress and he ends up falling in love with her and basically wants to be with her, not knowing that he is pixels and she is a living, breathing human being. However this shows that the AI can learn and change and grow and this is not only a good thing for Keys, the developer of this function, but also a bad thing for the man that stole it because this could reveal what he’s been trying to hide all along.

At the start of the movie you see Guy going through his normal daily routine and this highly reminded me of The Lego Movie. You think in the Lego movie he was just another boring side character until he met Wyldstyle a.k.a. Jodie Comer’s character and then they become this hero, and that’s exactly what Guy went through! It’s basically the same movie but one is set with Lego pieces and one is set in a video game, what’s really the difference?

And going onto video game movies we had Ready Player One. I absolutely adored Ready Player One, it mixed the real life with the video game life, it moulded the two worlds and it had people that were trying to bring down a corporation that was trying to steal the essence of that game. Oh, where have we had that before? In Free Guy, where the founder of Free City is trying to take down the normal guy that is trying to create this incredible world and keep this game going as it should’ve been when it was first created. Again, it’s very similar and so why do we need this movie?

And I will say and this is on a slightly different tangent, the last film it reminded me of was the Truman Show. in the Truman Show Truman is a man who has been born into this TV world that he thinks is real, much like Guy being birthed into this video game thinking that it’s real life, and only through other people in the system telling him the truth does he realise that he is not what he thinks. He and his whole life is a lie, it’s as if they’ve bought these three films together and moulded them into one, and while I get that Disney can do that because they’re a big corporation that can take all these ideas and no one will bat an eyelid, I also wonder where is the imagination? Where is the excitement? And where are the new ideas? Disney has been known recently for remaking their old stuff and now I feel they are just making movies that have done wonderfully in the past in a new way and hoping audiences don’t notice, but here’s the thing: I did.

This is not me saying Free Guy is a bad movie. Free Guy is not a bad movie, it is hilarious, it is fun, it will appeal to young adults and teenagers and child audiences that are into video games and twitch and YouTube and the online network as it is, but I feel there are movies that have done this idea and in some ways better. Disney pull on their ownership of Star Wars and Marvel and have characters that are cookie cutters and actors that play them that are obvious choices, and I feel they’re just taking ideas from other areas and making it as easy as they can to appeal to a new audience, and for me I feel those older movies should get more recognition than this new movie which is basically just a rehash.

If you have seen those movies and want to try something new then I do recommend Free Guy because it is a good film. But for me I feel it’s done better elsewhere and sticking it to the man here, as Disney is such a big corporation, do they really deserve all this money and fame and glory when you could go look at other creators work that could be more imaginative? Could be more exciting and more ingenious? I know which I’d choose.

What do you think of Free Guy?

Until next time.

Published by shonaharding

Media graduate with a passion for reviewing film and TV. View all posts by shonaharding