Free Guy (2021) - Entertaining action-adventure cinema on the pulse of time with valuable life lessons - 8/10 (27/10/21)

Free Guy is an imaginative science-fiction adventure movie in the key of Ready Player One that should appeal to kids, teenagers and young adults who enjoy playing video games.

The movie revolves around two parallel stories. In our real world, developers Walter McKey and his estranged partner Millie Rusk try to prove that selfish head developer Antwan Hovachelik has illegally used their source code to create a highly successful open-world video game. In said game, a non-player character named Guy develops an artificial intelligence when encountering a character named Molotov Girl who is actually Millie Rusk's game character. The two characters start working together in the game to find traces of the hidden source code that could benefit Millie Rusk and Walter McKey in real life.

This film convinces on many levels. First of all, the movie has a vibrant mixture of multiple genres such as action, adventure, comedy, drama, romance and science-fiction. The special effects are outstanding and bring a video game to life in an imaginative way with numerous creative details and breathtaking settings. The two story lines are cleverly interwoven and deliver poignant messages against greed and for love. The acting performances are solid and especially Ryan Reynolds manages to give the lead character a sympathetic, quirky and funny personality.

At the end of the day, Free Guy is an entertaining action-adventure movie on the pulse of time that can be enjoyed by children, teenagers and young adults as it teaches valuable life lessons. If you don't appreciate video games or if you were looking for a movie with more thrilling twists, you might however end up finding the movie too modern or too childish. There are also too many similarities between this film and Ready Player One in my opinion. While this film is certainly entertaining and memorable as there aren't too many of its kind yet, the under-appreciated Serenity is even more creative, mature and profound in the same genre.