Watching Free Guy was a frustrating experience akin to watching an idiot gamble away the contents of your wallet, losing every time. I can ignore the technical/scientific nonsense but the plot holes, self-contradictions, and inconsistencies are so dire I was amazed. Did the scriptwriters even bother to read their whole script straight? The rules of the video-game world are re-written so many times it's impossible to care.

On top of that, it's way too derivative--I was constantly seeing echoes of superior movies. Just think, each film it apes has its own strength---the anarchic imagination of the Lego Movie, the human touch of the Truman Show, the stylized action and philosophy of the Matrix, the expert effects and direction of Ready Player 1, the innovation of both Tron movies...but Free Guy has nothing. It is nothing. Watch any of the above-mentioned films instead.

One extra star for Taika Waititi, who is one of the few truly funny actors alive. But he is stuck playing the stock cartoonish capitalist--you know, the one that mediocre writers use to personalize their own hate. (The only time I remember the cartoonish capitalist really working was Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three; Wilder always wrote his characters as human beings even as they went wildly over the top).

Who is the target market for this? The Fortnite trappings and glaringly obvious messages imply that it is for kids and not adults, but then why the profanity and crude innuendos? If it's for older gamers than why does it have so many gags at their expense? (Even denigrating them as 'toxic trolls' and 'man-babies'...Man, gamers will love that). Maybe the filmmakers had Ryan Reynolds in mind as a target audience. Apparently they do exist somewhere..

"Maybe we can be whoever we want!" goes the movie's prepubescent mantra. Well, I could tell that Guy's best friend obviously wanted to be Kevin Hart but other than that I don't know who exactly the NPCs wanted to be. Oh well.