Certified Canadian that he is, Ryan Reynolds makes an ideal ambassador of niceness for the new sci-fi action-comedy “Free Guy.” With his surgically precise satirical delivery, Reynolds is usually at his best as a purveyor of snark; here, though, he betrays not a hint of his usual ripping sarcasm. The movie’s no “Deadpool”, in other words (it’s rated PG-13), but Reynolds is generally hilarious, nevertheless.
His character, a super-cheery bank teller named Guy (“Don’t have a good day, have a great day!”), tells us at the top of the story that he lives in “paradise,” a place of sunny serenity called Free City, where everyone is unfailingly pleasant and there are never any ugly surprises. True, at the bank where he works, there’s an armed robbery every day, but hey, it’s not really so bad.
What Guy doesn’t realize is that he’s actually living inside an online computer game, and that many of the heavily armed people he observes moving through it are the avatars of real-world game players. Unlike them, Guy and his friends, such as bank guard Buddy (Lil Rel Howery), are background characters, carrying out preprogrammed actions over and over and over.
But there’s a seed of consciousness inside Guy’s head, and it begins to sprout the minute he spots a woman (Jodie Comer) walking down the street in tough-lady leather pants and boots, with a gun on her hip. She calls herself Molotov Girl, and we eventually learn that her real name is Millie, that she’s a game programmer in the real world, and that it was she who worked on the code that was stolen for use in the game in which Guy is resident. Now she’s on the hunt for the thief, a megalomaniacal gaming mogul named Antwan (Taika Waititi), also of the real world, who’s minting money with the hyperpopular game.
As Guy levels up within the game — learns more and more about it and gets better and better at it — he and Millie are drawn into partnership and Guy starts to … come alive, is the only way to put it.
The issues that are raised in this movie — mainly questions about autonomous artificial intelligence and what it means to be human — are not novel and not pursued very far (a disappointment since the picture is able to find time to run about 15 minutes longer than it should). And much of what we see happening here is likely to put viewers in mind of such familiar cultural artifacts as “The Truman Show” and the “Grand Theft Auto” games. Director Shawn Levy, who did the “Night at the Museum” movies, maintains a lively pace until about halfway through the picture, when he seems to start losing control of its tone.
But the cast is mostly great — especially Channing Tatum, who has a small but terrifically daffy part as a helpful avatar. (Whatever you might normally expect from Tatum, you don’t get it here.) Reynolds and Comer have a sweet (if rather mild — the PG-13 thing) chemistry; and Joe Keery (“Stranger Things”) and Utkarsh Ambudkar, playing a pair of Millie’s fellow computer drones, get some sharp lines and make the most of them. The only letdown is Waititi — his scenery-gobbling performance, heavy on neo-B-boy jive-spouting, begins to grate after maybe two minutes. For the first half of the picture, though, when his nonsense is outweighed by all the fun stuff going on, it’s not really so bad.
