Free Guy

Ein Feel-Good-Disney-Crossover von Die Truman Show und TRON: Legacy mit einer netten Portion einer ansteckenden Romantik und mit Actionszenen im Stil von Ready Player One. Eine angenehme Besetzung, schön bunt, mit typischen ansprechenden Klischees sowie einigen tollen Ideen. Nur das dramaturgische Gerüst mit den Motivationen der Figuren und die Gründe, warum gerade das passiert, was passiert, passen nicht so ganz. Das ist aber mein Problem, dass ich auch bei so einem Film erwarte, dass er aus logischer Sicht ausgefeilt ist und alles Sinn ergibt. (12.08.2021)

Game character Ryan Reynolds has become sentient and decided to do good, and that can have far-reaching consequences in the game. This action comedy relies on a combination of wild action, slightly wacky humor, a bunch of pop culture references, a very plucky hero and an unexpectedly positive atmosphere. It's fun to watch. (14.08.2021)

Ready Free Guy One! The surprise of the summer and Shawn Levy at his best! I tipped Free Guy at around 60% before the premiere, and I'm really happy that it turned out to be an unexpected hit that will please all the nerds, fanboys and gameboys who grew up on GTA – this target audience will be the most excited, but the rest will have fun too. Ryan Reynolds is in his best role since Deadpool and fits in really well here – I think he took his performance here up another level. The film has a likeable world and story, an interesting plot, with countless ideas and references that had me thinking, this must have been thought up by a genius. Most of the game's Easter eggs are fun (Trolls exists ?), and the Marvel references must be making the rounds in memes all over the internet by now, because they had the whole cinema laughing. Apart from the playful and awesome visuals, the excellent and clear action, the leads have great chemistry, and the romantic line is warmly delivered. By the end I was literally crying with so much emotion that I could have sunk the Titanic with my tears. And then there is the shocking final twist (there are other twists, of course, but the final one had me on all fours, almost crawling out of the cinema). I was expecting a silly and entertaining movie, but I got the full package with everything and the big screen suits it. I enjoyed the whole two hours, and Taika Waititi as the bad guy was awesome. Story 4/5, Action 5/5, Humor 4/5, Violence 0/5, Fun 5/5 Music 4/5, Visuals 5/5, Atmosphere 4/5, Suspense 4/5, Emotion 4/5. 9/10. (17.08.2021)

Free Guy is Tron: Legacy strained through the sieve of Idiocracy, but instead of satarising bullshit, it gives the illusion of freedom with an ingratiating corporate smile. Free Guy shows the absurd degradation of the ideals of cyberpunk into a mediocre tale for a generation weaned on social-media myths about the exclusivity and brilliance of every individual. The film’s messianic romance, financed by the mega-corporation Disney, which is something that William Gibson never dreamed of, performs a diversion manoeuvre in the form of a cartoonish villain, while shoving prefabricated illusions, bought-off YouTube stars and its own bling down the throats of its adolescent target audience. It is also starting to be sad how Ryan Reynolds is becoming a slave to his doggedly constructed image as a bad-boy nerd as he begins to embody the cliché of 40-somethings playing young men chasing after would-be broad-minded women in their twenties. (28.11.2021)

A pleasant relax movie. A multi-player game of GTA filmed with real people with the message that you can do whatever you want that rides on Reynolds’ crazy humor and wild action scenes. The laid-back, optimistic atmosphere isn’t what I would have expected in the world of Grand Theft Auto, but I enjoyed it. Waititi’s villain must have seemed like a really exaggerated caricature, but he delivers in style... (28.09.2021)

Finally, someone found the balls to film GTA in all its glory and put together some healthy sophisticated romance onto it with nonchalant elegance. A great portion of fun, which is a bit hurt by the dodgy visuals and uneven pace, but it is reliably compensated by a well of great directorial ideas and the traditionally fun Reynolds. (29.09.2021)

Die größte Chance auf Erfolg hat Free Guy bei Computerspielern im Alter von etwa zehn Jahren, die idealerweise GTA und Fortnite spielen und sicherlich vor Freude quietschen werden. Ansonsten handelt es sich jedoch um eine halbherzige Actionkomödie mit Ryan Reynolds, einer soliden, aber vergessenswerten Action, einer unterdurchschnittlichen komödiantischen Komponente (Popkultur-Referenzen und Schauspieler-Cameos allein garantieren keinen Witz und der Versuch, schlagfertige Sprüche zu machen, verfehlt seine Wirkung) und einer schematischen Geschichte, die aus Motiven zusammengesetzt ist, die schon oft zuvor gesehen wurden und besser waren. Im Gegensatz zur Truman Show arbeitet Free Guy jedoch nicht mit satirischer Ebene oder tieferer Bedeutung, verglichen mit Ready Player One wirkt es inhaltlich bedeutend ärmer und einfallsloser und insgesamt erreicht es eher das Niveau der neuen Jumanji-Filme, mit denen es auch Inkonsistenzen und Unklarheiten in den Regeln seiner eigenen fiktiven Welt teilt und nur darauf abzielt, unverbindlich zu unterhalten, ohne jeglichen weiteren Anspruch. In dieser Hinsicht besteht Free Guy als leichter, sommerlicher Actionspaß unter anderem auch dank seiner professionellen technischen Umsetzung, des charmanten Konzepts über das Leben von Videospiel-NPC-Charakteren und der sympathischen Besetzung. Es wird jedoch auf eine Weise realisiert, die bei weitem nicht sein reichhaltiges Potenzial in ausreichendem Maße ausschöpft, wodurch es überall dort, wo Free Guy schicksalhaft, komplex und absolut mitreißend sein möchte, nur unvollständig, oberflächlich und ganz gewöhnlich bleibt. (15.08.2021)

Free Guy versprüht sichtlich die Atmosphäre von Ready Player One, und auch wenn Spielbergs Film viel verspielter und ausgefeilter war, verliert Guy nicht an Reiz und schafft es, während seiner fast zweistündigen Laufzeit zu unterhalten, zu begeistern und sogar ein wenig zu bewegen. Das Thema des Films ist sicherlich spannend, und trotz einiger kleiner Schwächen war ich mit der Art und Weise, wie es behandelt wurde, zufrieden. Ähnlich wie im RPO gibt es viele Verweise auf die Popkultur und eine humorvolle Anspielung, um die sich die Hauptfigur Guy verdient gemacht hat. Manchmal war die Handlung des Films so bizarr, dass ich mich fragte, ob Taika Waititi als Antwan am Drehbuch mitgeschrieben hatte, während er sich gleichzeitig wie eine PG(-13)-Version von Deadpool anfühlte. Ryan Reynolds ist ein sympathischer Charakter, der von der bis dato nahezu unbekannten Jodie Comer großartig unterstützt wird. Waititi mag übertrieben theatralisch gewesen sein, aber meinetwegen. Der Hinweis auf die (Un-)Wichtigkeit des Individuums und die Chancengleichheit für jeden von uns war ein wenig offensichtlich, aber sympathisch vorgetragen. (28.08.2021)

I like The Matrix comparison a lot, because it illustrates the transformation of the perception of pretty similar themes. The Matrix is about the problem of disconnection from an oppressive system, Free Guy is a film primarily about adapting to oppression and ultimately defends the artificial system. It pretends to be an anti-capitalist fable, with the antagonist, the evil businessman, ultimately being punished by the invisible hand of the market. Similarly, it pretends to be a film about the need to break free from repetitive mechanisms, but in the end it merely replaces them with other repetitive mechanisms. And no, it's not a conscious thing. It offers all this with the white-knuckled grin of a podcaster trying to sell you his Kickstarter project with artificial enthusiasm. Cyberpunk dystopia has been around for a long time, and it's pretty faithful to its predecessors. Yet they still failed to appreciate that such a reality would look not like decimated metropoles but like ubiquitous sunny franchises full of coolness and camaraderie, because they apparently didn't think to work with the powers of marketing capitalism at all. Thus, twenty years after young directors succeeded in making prescient science fiction about how humans are unable to disconnect from the system through which machines have discovered, among other things, that the human condition is defined through suffering, we are faced with a conformist blah film shot like a Starbucks commercial that tries hysterically to pretend how fresh and young it is. Except it's devotee shit from a 50-year-old director with a 45-year-old protagonist, made for the assured man-children on whom the whole system rests and whose idea of resistance is Movember and dry February. Oh, and it's 80% on Rotten Tomatoes. So shoot yourself immediately. (09.11.2021)

Since my motor skills aren't what they used to be I spend most of my days watching movies and (who knew?) playing online games. So Free Guy was just the perfect thing for me. In the game I'm currently playing the most, NPCs don't get eliminated, so I didn't have to feel guilty and could have a lot of fun watching Guy's fate. It wasn’t hard to enjoy this movie, because the writing wasn't bad at all, the cast was multicultural but the choices made sense, the dialogue wasn’t dumb, and Dude had the best unscripted lines I've ever heard. It would have deserved five stars if it hadn't been for the clumsy romance that slowed down the pace and the inspirational speeches followed by typically American "spontaneous" applause. (01.01.2022)