Ryan Reynolds has now reached a point in his career where he can do pretty much whatever he wants. He often looks like he’s having a lot of fun in his performances, too, something which is more apparent than ever in the new trailer for delayed action comedy Free Guy.
The story follows Guy, a strikingly ordinary man who works as a bank teller in a chaotic world of nonstop histrionic carnage. He’s in actuality an NPC in a Grand Theft Auto-style urban hellscape of open world gaming, where the sole purpose of his days is to act as background fodder for the gamers playing out missions of explosive violence that wreak Godzilla levels of destruction on the city around them.
However, after a pair of programmers insert some extra code into the title, he becomes aware of his entire life being an artificial creation, and with the help of the sexy nerd avatar of one of the rogue coders (Jodie Comer, now recognizable globally from her mesmerizing performance as Villanelle in Killing Eve), he must become the hero of his own story and save his world before the game is taken offline and his very existence is consigned to oblivion.
Although Reynolds is best known for action and comedy, this looks to put a slant on both, with much of the humor coming from the juxtaposition of Guy’s newfound intuitive and deadly skills with amazed cluelessness when they’re revealed, as well as his failed attempts to sound like a macho action hero.
While video game movies are often seen as a cursed subgenre, far more successful in imitating the relevant atmosphere are original creations styled like a game adaptation, such as Death Race, Crank or Scott Pilgrim vs the World. Free Guy is another take on such a premise, with its setting being a variation on familiar properties, but spun on its head to create something new. And with any luck, it’ll resonate well with audiences when it premieres on December 11th.
