In summer blockbuster Free Guy, life is but a video game
New York – In the face of relentless headlines about war, disease and apocalyptic climate change, Canadian director Shawn Levy is offering an “antidote” to the misery with a story about hope, kindness and the very human tendency to transcend the sometimes grim realities of everyday life.
Opening in cinemas here on Aug 12, sci-fi action comedy Free Guy – about a man who realises he is a character in a video game – eschews some of the heavier philosophical themes around free will seen in the likes of The Matrix and Blade Runner in favour of a simple message: You are in control of your own destiny.
Canadian actor Ryan Reynolds takes a left turn from his more cynical, wiseguy persona in Deadpool to star as a wholesome everyman-type bank teller who discovers he is actually a background player in a video game and decides to take charge of his own story.
Free Guy feels “like an antidote to much of what we’ve been living through, in that the movie is about hopefulness and the preservation of some innocence in the midst of a very cynical world”, said Levy, best known for helming the Night At The Museum film trilogy and TV series Stranger Things.
Echoing 1998’s The Truman Show, in which Jim Carrey played the unwitting star of a reality TV show, Reynolds similarly inhabits a staged world.
Every morning, his character Guy gets up, greets his goldfish and burns his mouth with scorching coffee, unperturbed by the explosions and the fights taking place around him.
His world is a video game and he is one of the nameless, disposable, minor background characters that would be familiar to players of games like Grand Theft Auto.
But when Guy finally takes his destiny into his own hands, the well-oiled mechanics thought up by the creators of the game goes off the rails.
The film is set in a video game world, but Reynolds says that doesn’t make it a video game movie.
“We’re kind of smuggling a lot of other themes into that premise,” he said.
In a business dominated by sequels, spin-offs and franchises, he adds that Free Guy stands out.
“It’s become an increasingly rare unicorn in this industry where you get to make a movie that is based on nothing other than an original idea,” said the Hollywood star, who is also a producer on the film.
With a playful tone honed in his Night At The Museum trilogy, where skeletons and stuffed animals come alive at night, Levy deploys a gallery of familiar characters from hit games like Fortnite.
Against a backdrop of a love story, the narrative also unfolds on the other side of the screen, in the video game publisher’s studio.
Alongside Reynolds, the cast includes Joe Keery of Stranger Things fame, Jodie Comer (best known for her role in spy thriller Killing Eve) and Thor director Taika Waititi as a boss greedy for profits.
It also features cameos by Channing Tatum, late Jeopardy host Alex Trebek and famous professional gaming YouTubers like Ninja, who has some 24 million subscribers to his live streams.
But he was uncomfortable seeing himself on the big screen.
“I don’t want to see myself on camera, which is funny because I’m always on camera, so it’s a little weird,” said Ninja, whose real name is Richard Tyler Blevins. - AFP/REUTERS
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