Rent Free Guy on Amazon Video (paid link)
Written by: Matt Lieberman and Zak Penn (screenplay by), Matt Lieberman (story by)
Directed by: Shawn Levy
Starring: Ryan Reynolds, Jodie Comer, Taika Waititi, Lil Rel Howery, Joe Keery, Channing Tatum
Rated: PG-13
Watch the trailer
Plot
A bank teller discovers that he's actually an NPC (non-player character) inside a brutal, open world video game.
Verdict
A movie has to get creative to make a video game as real life conceit work. It's difficult to suspend disbelief at times as frequently you might think, video games don't work that way. What starts out as a neat concept devolves into a rather typical save the world ending that's completely manufactured to give the movie a semblance of a plot. It's rather bland compared to the initial tone of the movie.
Skip it.
Review
Bringing a video game to life is not an easy feat. They're two separate things in reality, but in this movie Guy is the protagonist and a video game character. The opening feels like The Lego Movie with the incredibly chipper Guy (Ryan Reynolds).
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| Ryan Reynolds plays Guy |
There's a huge disbelief factor to overcome as this concept is more than far fetched. We switch between the real world and the video game which looks realistic in the game, but pixelated when viewing it in real life. NPC Guy manages to take a player's glasses in game and then he can see what human players see. I wondered how this concept would become a full movie. That's helped by the second story where Millie (Jodie Comer) is searching the video game for hidden code of a game she created.
Millie and Guy meet and form a pseudo-friendship, though in reality she would not give him so much time. He seems like a child playing the game for the first time, which in the context of the movie isn't far from the truth. Guy resolves to help Millie.
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| Jodie Comer plays Millie |
The game world is a riff on something like Grand Theft Auto online where players's goal is mayhem. There's plenty of of gags about what people look like in real life versus their video game avatars. Everyone thinks Guy is a hacker as NPC's aren't sentient and can't play the game. He makes national news by playing the game as a good guy. That might be the most outlandish thing, that playing a video game as a good guy makes national headlines and pulls people together. For a short time, this is an interesting twist on a time loop as Guy levels up and learns how to 'play' the game by dying frequently initially.
This certainly takes a lot of liberties with how video games work, but that's the only way to make something like this function. The movie relies heavily on CGI as there's no other easy way to bridge the gap between these disparate worlds. This does capture the concept and common tropes. There's a lot of fan service and cameos. It can be really funny at times, that is until the last third where this creates drama and easy resolutions to craft a third act. That makes this movie needlessly long as it also wraps up the story and then shoe horns additional sub plots for a movie that's already too long and effectively over.
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