Shawn Levy’s Free Guy has one of the better hooks of the 2021 studio slate: a bank teller in an open-world video game finds out he is not the hero, not even a player, but a background character with a scripted life. Ryan Reynolds plays that teller. Matt Lieberman and Zak Penn wrote the screenplay from Lieberman’s story. It runs 115 minutes. The tagline promises that life is too short to be a background character. The promise is real. The delivery is uneven.
Trailer, via 20th Century Studios.
The Bank Window in Free City
Free City is the game, built by Soonami Studios. Players put on sunglasses and spend their time fighting each other and causing mayhem. The non-player characters, or NPCs, take the chaos in stride, living out their scripted lives with no idea the world is a game. Guy works a clerk’s window in the bank. His best friend is Buddy, a security guard played by Lil Rel Howery.
Every day is the same day. That is a clean setup, and Levy knows it. The first act works because the film takes the routine seriously before it breaks it. Guy does not know he is a machine. He knows he likes his coffee, his friend and his routine, and the film lets that be enough.
When Jodie Comer’s avatar MolotovGirl sings “Fantasy,” his favorite song, something in him moves. He deviates from his programming. He shoots a player robbing the bank. He takes the sunglasses.
Millie Rusk and the Stolen Code
The film’s second engine is Millie Rusk, played by Comer. She is an unemployed software developer who plays Free City looking for proof that Soonami stole the source code from Life Itself, the concept game she built with her friend Walter “Keys” McKey. Life Itself included novel artificial intelligence techniques for its NPCs. Keys, played by Joe Keery, is reluctant to help. He works technical support at Soonami now.
That is the plot’s spine, and it is thinner than it should be. The theft is asserted, then chased, then resolved. Comer is good in both registers, and she wore a short dark-brown wig and used a Southern English accent for MolotovGirl, a detail that pays off because her real-world scenes land differently than her in-game ones. But Millie’s grievance never gets the screen time its stakes demand.
Blue Shirt Guy Goes Worldwide
Keys and his coworker Mouser, played by Utkarsh Ambudkar, think Guy is a hacker disguised as an NPC. They try to ban him and fail. Guy, now seeing the players’ view of the game, visits new areas and meets Millie at vlogger Revenjamin Buttons’ stash house, where they try to steal evidence leading to her source code. She thinks he is a novice player and tells him to level up.
He does. Guy progresses fast by completing missions benevolently, standing apart from the players around him, and becomes a worldwide sensation known as “Blue Shirt Guy.” Keys realizes the truth: Guy is an NPC. Other NPCs Guy interacts with start to develop self-awareness too.
This is the best stretch of Free Guy. The benevolence gimmick is a real joke with a real point, and the film’s comparison set — Ready Player One, The Truman Show, The Matrix, Grand Theft Auto, Fortnite — is fair, though Free Guy is gentler than most of them and less interested in cruelty. Taika Waititi’s Antwan Hovachelik, the faux-polite Soonami founder who stole the code and plans to replace Free City with Free City 2, is the villain the film needs and the one it overuses.
48 Hours Until Free City 2
Free City 2 ships in 48 hours. When it does, Free City dies and every NPC in it terminates. That clock is the film’s best structural idea, and it is also where the seams show. A movie about a man with no choices has to make its ending feel chosen, and Free Guy reaches for that. It mostly gets there. It does not earn every step.
Channing Tatum appears as Revenjamin Buttons, the avatar who owns the stash house. Aaron W. Reed physically plays Dude, an incomplete muscular version of Guy with a blue shirt tattoo on his chest, built for Free City 2. Reynolds provides Dude’s uncredited voice and facial motion capture.
These are good gags. They are also the kind of thing a movie does when it is not sure its central idea can carry 115 minutes.
What the Numbers Say
Free Guy grossed $331.5 million worldwide against a production budget of $100–125 million. It premiered at the 74th Locarno Film Festival on August 10, 2021, and opened in United States theaters three days later, distributed by 20th Century Studios. Filming ran in Massachusetts and California between May and July 2019. Two delays, both caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, pushed the release back.
Lieberman began the script in 2016, and 20th Century Fox bought it soon after. Levy passed at first, then reconsidered after Hugh Jackman introduced him to Reynolds, which meant leaving the Uncharted adaptation he had been developing. Disney’s acquisition of 21st Century Fox made Free Guy one of the first films produced by the studio to keep going under Disney’s ownership.
The commercial result is the part that mattered to the industry. A $331.5 million gross on that budget in that release window is a hit, and it is the reason a film this odd got made at this scale at all.
Key facts
- Release: August 13, 2021, in the United States
- Premiere: 74th Locarno Film Festival, August 10, 2021
- Runtime: 115 minutes
- Production budget: $100–125 million
- Worldwide gross: $331.5 million
- Metacritic: 62/100
Release schedule
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 2016 | Lieberman begins the script |
| May–July 2019 | Filming in Massachusetts and California |
| August 10, 2021 | Locarno Film Festival premiere |
| August 13, 2021 | U.S. theatrical release |
| 48 hours (in film) | Free City 2 replaces Free City |
Comer, Keery and the Rest of the Cast
Comer is the best thing in Free Guy, and the film does not always know it. Her Millie is the only character with a grievance that predates the movie, and the only one whose want is not a joke. Keery plays Keys as a man who has already given up, which is the right read.
Howery’s Buddy is warm and gets the film’s cleanest emotional beat. Ambudkar’s Mouser is underused. Waititi is doing a bit, and the bit is funny for about two scenes.
Reynolds is the whole engine, and he is doing the thing he does. If that thing works for you, Free Guy works. If it does not, no amount of NPC philosophy will save it.
What Free Guy Actually Earns
Free Guy is a good idea wearing a familiar coat. The premise — an NPC who decides to be the hero of his own story in a world where there are no limits — is strong enough to survive the film’s weaker stretches, and the benevolence gimmick gives it a real comic engine rather than a premise alone. Levy keeps it moving. The script is funnier in its structure than in its lines.
What holds it back is ambition it does not fully spend. The stolen source code is a plot device, not a theme. Antwan is a cartoon when he could have been a critique. And the film’s comparison to The Truman Show is invited, not earned; that movie asked what a manufactured life costs, and Free Guy mostly asks whether the manufactured guy can get the girl and save the day.
It can. That is fine. It is not more than fine. Free Guy is a solid, likable, occasionally sharp studio comedy that knows its hook and rides it.
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