Did you ever wonder what is the day in a life of that background character in that violent car stealing videogame that your good-for-nothing grandchild plays all day?

This movie tells the story of a videogame character that comes to life. Guy is a non-playable character from the game called Free City. One day he realizes his reality is fake, he is just character in a video game. You could expect that it leads to an introspection on sentience or on the extents and limits of artificial intelligence. Something like Ex Machina perhaps? Think again! In Free Guy, Ryan Reynolds has to run across a bridge so that the servers are not shut down. By the way, he becomes "free" and his name is Guy, get it?

That is it basically, that is the extent of the story. There is no drama, no arc, no twist, nothing of interest. It is not relatable, because the videogame is such a caricature. There is nothing original or unique about it. It is like an episode of Black mirror but without anything good about it. There is nothing clever nor is there an interesting angle. Guy is sentient from the start by the way, he never actually becomes free. He just realizes he is in a videogame which leads to Taika Waititi wanting to shut him down because of money.

I mean it is hard to imagine something even more ignorant of videogames as a genre ever. Not only is the movie utterly un-interested in videogames, as a cultural phenomenon; it does not understand them; it does not get what they are about, why people spend their time playing them. It only seems them superficially; it only sees the mechanics but not the content. It sees players and servers and power ups and running around killing "people". The movie does not even bother defining the game itself. We are never told if there are goals or a purpose in Free City. Free City is the most generic GTA-like you can imagine. It seems the only thing there is to do is violent crimes, like robbing banks and killing bystanders.

It seems nobody told the people that are responsible for Free Guy that videogames are an actual art form. Like a painting or a sculpture is an idealized representation of reality. Like music or poetry it can excite the senses and indulge in fantasy. Like other storytelling devices, it can provide escapism and even challenge our perception of reality. Nobody ever mentions that GTA, for example, is a satire of America.

Free City treats it in the most superficial way possible. Videogames are not for escapism or fantasy they are about expressing our most violent impulses. It is the thing all the kids are doing and that's makes those brats violent. That is the underlying energy of the movie. The film lays out the worldview that killing an NPC is equivalent to killing a living person. It is not even an exploration of it or a question it tries to resolve, it is a statement that is treated as fact.

It has nothing to offer about free will. It has no questions on what is AI and what about sentience and existence and so on.

It is a film that is completely retrograde. Birth of nation is a more progressive and enlightened movie than this. Jud Süß is a better depiction of reality than this.