 Is Free Guy worth picking up the controller for? Or is it just as lame as that video game reference I made? Let's find out. Free Guy stars Ryan Reynolds as a NPC named Guy. What's an NPC, Adam? Well, that's a non-playable character for the laymans out there that aren't into the video gaming world. I am a gamer myself. I consider myself an avid gamer, so... A movie like this, uh... The plot, believe it or not, is akin to the Truman Show. I wasn't expecting that going in, but it was very familiar. After about 15 minutes. Guy is a background character in a video game. He's inconsequential. He does the same thing every day, not realizing it. That is until one day, when he falls head over pixels for a character he meets in the game. He doesn't know he's in a game, so this is just a regular woman to him. A woman that steals, a woman that kills, a woman that will break your heart if you letter. Over the course of the film, that love is shared. It's reciprocated back. I don't know if that's the proper use of that term, but I'm gonna go with it. This hot, strong female lead is controlled by Millie in the real world. She's playing the game constantly because of reasons she has. There's personal issues she has with this game, and so she's kind of undercover inside of the universe trying to figure out how she can take down this evil corporation from the inside. Judy Kummer plays this character, and I have to say she's giving me straight-up Wynonna Ryder vibes, like young Wynonna Ryder going on here. And her character's name is Millie, and there's a Millie Bobby Brown actress who's in Stranger Things with Wynonna Ryder, and also Steve is in this from Stranger Things, the guy with the beautiful hair he's in this. A lot of Stranger Things connections, and I looked up on IMDb, and the director of this film is a producer on Stranger Things. So wow, what a roller coaster of information I just shared that has really no bearing on anything. Let's continue. The amazing director Taika Waititi is in this, I think I said that correctly, and it's probably sacrilege to even say this, but I did not like his character in this movie. Really weird. He was going for this bro eccentric nerd type, almost gangster, gangsta, if you will. It just didn't play for me. I thought his performance was just not good in this. I think it's maybe because everyone around him is a straight man. They're playing it, you know, they're playing it very straight, and he is just like an Austin Powerish character. None of that stuff flew. Okay, I didn't like it. And Ryan Reynolds' character, listen, Ryan Reynolds, I think he's a gem of an actor. I prefer my Ryan Reynolds snarky. I prefer him being a smart ass, sarcastic, kind of a dick. That's the Ryan Reynolds I know and love. The Reynolds we have here is the complete opposite. He's very happy, he's very emotional, he's very connected to those around him. He likes to put people up and not tear them down. I don't want that for my Ryan Reynolds. That's not the Ryan Reynolds I signed up for. Here's the God's honest truth. Have you ever eaten at a fast food place you really like if you eat fast food, or just trash food in general, or had a cereal that you really like? So you kept going back to it. One, two, three times a week maybe, maybe if you're crazier there every day. And after a while, it starts to taste stale, formulaic, not very good. And then you take a step back and realize, you know what? There's other food out there that's a lot better. This is actually garbage. This is pure uncut trash that I'm feeding myself. That's kind of where I'm at with movies like Free Guy. If you don't have it often, you get some wonderful effects, you get some kind of big bang theory-ish jokes about nerd culture and how everyone's a virgin living in their mom's basement, playing games pretending they're some super awesome dude. You know, all the stereotypes, all the cliches we've heard time and time again, you get the ready player one setting that we've now seen at Nazium. You get tons of references to other pop culture via crappy music thrown in here and there, via Fortnite and Marvel and all sorts of shit. It's actually really interesting because they don't do a ton of it until like the last five minutes. I swear that the executives found out they got the go-ahead from Disney and their ilk to use Star Wars and Marvel and all this stuff, so like go, go, go, go, go, go, go, put in as much shit as you can in the last couple minutes. And it's not just cringe, it's giga-cringe levels. I mean, people are getting blown away by things they're seeing in a game world where I would assume that you would be able to purchase these items in a store and everyone would have them, but you know, a person busts something out and they're all like, oh my God! No, I don't buy it. I'll jump into spoilers in a little bit, not that there's a whole lot to spoil in Free Guy. I'm sure I've called this new guy once or twice, and if I haven't, I'll be honestly surprised. That's a different movie, New Guy. I keep like, for some reason getting that title in the back of my head, so just, if I do, that's on me. Okay, that's not on you, that's on me. I don't know why it would be on you. The target market for this movie is question mark. I mean, I guess it, like I said, it has kind of the big bang theory stank to it, so, and that was a very popular show for some reason I'll never understand. So maybe people will love this. I didn't. I'm kind of over it, kind of over the whole, the whole world within a world thing outside of The Matrix. I'll never be over that, and I'm incredibly scared for The New Matrix. God, I hope they don't screw this up. Actually, I think it's just Lana Wachowski doing it, not even both Wachowskis. So maybe that's a good thing. I'd say it's a movie geared towards gamers in their early teens. There is one F-word dropped, because it's PG-13, and they have to get that edgy F-word thrown in. I think they're allowed one or maybe two at the most to keep a PG-13. There's a little bit of swearing besides that. It's pretty harmless. I mean, I think swearing is harmless to begin with, so whatever, though, whatever your preference is, just letting you know for your family. Violence-wise, there's a decent amount of action. It's kind of cartoonish, though. People get shot in the face, but it's off-camera. It's implied. But again, it's a little bit loony-toonsical to make up a word on the fly. There is a really weird 30-second scene with a character I won't spoil. Kind of a cameo, I guess. And he's doing all sorts of just cringe-level Fortnite dance moves, some of the more sexual in nature. So if you're uncomfortable with seeing a man do a lot of gyrating and bizarre magic mic-ish type dances, maybe that's not for you. I think, again, it's pretty harmless stuff. I just would rather show my kids like Ferris Bueller or something. That's good. The movie definitely is trying to give nods to gamers, though. There's, you know, tea-bagging in there. There's people glitching into walls. We have popular prominent Twitch streamers in there that I probably don't even need to say their names and you know, just think of the top five earners and it's bound to be two of them. I don't actually know who's most popular on Twitch. I don't follow Twitch really. And how can we forget about IGN? They're all over this film. They're just stinking up the place. You have reporters from IGN. You've got commercials from IGN. Not GameStop, not Kotaku, not Joystick. None of those companies were around in Free Guy. So Adam, is this worth packing up the kids, heading out to the theaters to watch? Absolutely not. It's not even worth seeing by yourself or with one other person like I did. I would wait until this hit streaming services, preferably for free, you know, with your paid subscription to Netflix or HBO Max or Paramount Plus or all the other garbage that's out there now. There'll probably be six more streaming services by the time this hits home. So who knows where it'll be? It's anyone's guess. I'm now gonna jump into a little bit of the spoiler stuff that bothered me. So if you don't want to have anything ruined, you know, just tread lightly or walk away altogether, give this video a like, subscribe if you haven't, and I'll hopefully see you around. So the big plot of the movie is Key and Millie, two programmers from back in the day who made an amazing open world game where NPCs, I guess, and the players grew over time. Their emotions adapted to their surroundings and they became basically sentient, self-aware computer-generated players. It's Pulitzer Prize-winning stuff here. So what happens to it? Well, it gets fused into, it gets coded over inside of this game universe, this open world game, Something City, I forgot what it's even called, who cares. They're making a sequel to it anyways, so the fear is this code will be just completely destroyed. But right now it's housed inside this game and it's working, we find out, because Ryan Reynolds' character Guy, he's becoming aware of his surroundings, he's learning to love and to feel feelings outside of this coffee's too hot. We have some of the most talented, intelligent coders on the planet, and it takes them almost the entire film to realize that the person Guy is controlled by is himself. They keep thinking it's a player in the game and not an NPC. Everyone in the film thinks that for the longest time, and I'm like, this is not how coding works, this is not how development works. They would have shut the game down instantly if there was major problems like this, or they would have, I don't know, just deleted the character. For some reason this doesn't dawn on them, or they have some bullshit excuse why they can't, which makes no sense. Guy within the game is a background character who works at the bank. He has nothing to do with the story, with the gameplay, he's absolutely useless. You could pull his character, you could pull his code and nothing would change. And we know these guys are very talented because they're coding on the fly. They show close-ups of them typing on the keyboard, and shit's just appearing in the world, because that's how coding works in a complex environment like this. There's a scene that's ripped straight out of Ready Player One where they're driving away as the servers are being destroyed. The leaps of logic in this film, the way that they treat the audience as just the dumbest people on the planet, you don't have to know anything about coding. I do web development. It's not the same as game development, but I know that when you take an ax to a server, or to multiple servers, it doesn't just knock out tiny parts of the game, and they just slowly start to erase while you're out running it, like you're one of the actors in the film the day after tomorrow from the cold. As I was watching the movie, I wished so badly I had a notepad because I was so frustrated with all of this crap. I'm like, I gotta rate this down. I gotta note this. There's so much stuff that's annoying the shit out of me in this thing. And I know the age-old expression, just turn your brain off. Just turn off that old noggin. Don't think. I'm starting to realize that this is a term that hack-ass writers in a Hollywood have adopted and somehow put out into the ether, just a way for them to weasel out of their own awful scripts. Just turn your brain off. Don't think about it at all. Look at the colors. Look at the magic. How did we make it? Computers. Why is this still a thing? Why is this still a thing in the movie? It happens multiple times. I'm over it. I know the movie came out. It was made a while ago. It's been shelved for a while, but shit. I thought Sonic was the last time we were gonna see that crap. The floss? Hell no. Again, this is kind of catered to gamers. So gamers would pick this up. That's why I picked it up. But whenever people are playing the game, I have no idea what type of camera system is in place here. It's not first person. It's not third person. It's just this roaming camera that's conveniently locked on whatever scenario is going down. Even after the game is essentially destroyed, all the cameras are operational and they're focused on the final fight between Ryan Reynolds and that disgusting amalgamation of Ryan Reynolds and aroided up dude. Just, just horrific nightmarish stuff at play here. There was a plethora of other things that were annoying the shit out of me, but I forgot. This movie is gonna just come and go so quickly that I just don't think it's even worth complaining anymore about. I did get a laugh out of the Chris Evans cameo, I'll say that much. I'm not completely heartless here. It was unfortunately wrapped around a whole lot of bullshit. Like, member that, member that, lightsaber, Hulk, Hulk hand. Oh, God. That's it, those are my thoughts on Free Guy. Let me know in the comments if you agree or disagree or haven't seen it, have no desire to. Like the video if you had a good time. And as they say in the biz, this is game over, buddy. Video game reference. Subscribe. Thanks for watching the video. If you enjoy what I'm doing here, maybe think about jumping on over to Patreon at patreon.com slash Adam does movies, throwing me a dollar or two a month. It'll really help the channel out, really help me grow. Or you can become a join member right here on YouTube via that little join button. Those are a couple ways you could help out. Share the video as well, that's always nice. All right, take care. See you soon.