I have a very low tolerance for anything involving Ryan Reynolds, rivaled only by my low tolerance for gamer culture, so I didn't exactly have high hopes going into the new "Ryan Reynolds as a video game character" film Free Guy, directed by Shawn Levy (Night at the Museum, Real Steel, Stranger Things). To be upfront: the movie isn't for me, but not for reasons that have much to do with Ryan Reynolds or the film's depiction of gamer culture. Free Guy is, at it's core, a predictable romantic comedy where the love triangle is characterized by the romantic complication of game designer Millie, played by Jodie Comer (brilliant as the instantly iconic Villanelle in the TV series Killing Eve), having fallen in love with a rouge, AI-enhanced character from one of her game designs, the titular "free guy"-- a role tailor-made for Reynolds, an actor as dynamic as most video game characters, with the extra bonus of coming across as artificially intelligent. To my surprise, Reynolds is perfectly cast and truly holds the film down with his incessant sense of optimism and discovery, while Comer simply exudes an ability that far outshines anything this movie has to offer her, much less the actor playing her IRL love interest in the film, the perfectly acceptable Joe Keery (Stranger Things). To my even greater surprise, the performance that really makes me want to wipe the film from my memory comes from Taika Waititi, who I generally associated with a perfectly calibrated sense of humor (Jojo Rabbit, What We Do in the Shadows, Reservation Dogs)--in Free Guy, the poor guy is unfortunately left to flounder bombastically as the film's big bad Antwan.
The character of Antwan is a misfire of a caricature, to be sure, but the question is whether this greedy, corporate man-child who wants only to cash in on a re-boot of what sold before holds any resonance for the audience consuming Free Guy. If the trajectory of cinema as a mode of expression is a model for the future of gaming, the potential thought experiment about the future of gaming instigated by the film is an interesting one. Free Guy plays at being a movie "about" something, but for all it throws into the air about video-game violence vs real-world violence and the potential for utopian vs dystopian digital environments, it's unfortunately still mired in a banal and borrowed narrative structure, and all of that's wrapped in the ugly, cluttered aesthetics of video games--it's the same look that characterized Speilberg's Ready Player One (2018), also penned by Free Guy scribe Zak Penn, and similarly pandering to an audience interested in little more than spotting their favorite pop culture reference. In Ready Player One, as with Free Guy, any sense of artful pastiche is traded for an approach that Antwan would love: just give them what they want, and in excess. Some may say this is an accurate reflection of the gamer's experience with the visual/digital/interactive world, but to what extent does this cultural material get flattened out to the point of meaninglessness by this approach? I may be expressing just an aesthetic preference here for some, but, while more than a few gamer friends have expressed a learned and fervid appreciation of game design and theory, I have yet to experience the appeal. Taking into consideration all of my inexperience with gaming, is there a huge desire amongst gamers for utopian worlds that are more observed, less interactive, than ones populated by the player's potential for ever-increasing arms of war, vehicular slaughter, and the like? I applaud the movie if it's asking that question, and I think the evolution of game culture and media might evolve in ways that the film is, at least, hopeful about. Also, on a more superficial level, I'll be curious to see how Free Guy ages, with it's multiple "celebrity guest appearances" by online gamers I can only assume are famous to some portion of the audience--these appearances had as much resonance for me as would a cutaway to Howard Cosell for most of the target audience of Free Guy (but, who knows, maybe if you look closely enough Howard's somewhere in there, too).
Reminiscence, the debut feature film by Westworld writer/director Lisa Joy, is a sci-fi noir set in a near-future Miami, the effects of global warming having almost entirely submerged the city, creating a dangerous network of docks and piers to be navigated by the film's protagonist, Nick Bannister (Hugh Jackman). Bannister is an "oarsman of memory" who guides paying customers out of the bleak present and back through their fondest memories via some hi-tech imaging technology and a sensory-deprivation-like submersion tank. The trajectory of Bannister's desperate search for a vanished romance is set into motion by one of his customers, the right-on-cue femme-fatale Mae (Rebecca Ferguson), a night club singer with a few secrets. The search for Mae is paralleled by an odd and thinly drawn plot involving a political family scandal (not worth explaining), as well as a through-line involving Bannister's more grounded business partner, Watts (Thandie Newton). And, did I mention water? Yes, a lot of water. Filmmaker and critic Paul Schrader once characterized film noir stylistics as having "an almost Freudian attachment to water," and Reminiscence doubles-down on that attachment, making the jump from dark and rain-soaked streets to a fully flooded city of canals.
For me, all of this sounds pretty great on paper. And the script manages to find some of it's own poetic, noir-tinged voice, as with Mae's plea to the hopelessly lovesick Bannister to not say "always" because "always makes promises it can't keep." Unfortunately, Ferguson throws this line away when it should be savored or amplified by both her and the director, and much of the film has a similar feeling of not knowing how drastically this material needs to be pitched in order to work. There's little camp or fun to Reminiscence, so it comes off as desperately in need of acting and directing choices that are much wilder and risky than what made it to the final cut. And maybe it's not just a sense of "fun" that's missing, but, rather, any kind of personal touch...or personality. Of course, Hugh Jackman is a huge part of the problem; I can't think of a less interesting actor currently working in films of this size and budget. In classic noirs, often a central actor with a sort of "blank canvas" quality can be an interesting, deliberate choice...but Bannister needs to be captivating, a sort of ferryman or healer who spirals inward, eventually getting too high on his own supply. Not only is Jackman far less than compelling in portraying this journey, the sci-fi premise itself has been well tread (with diminishing returns) in films like Wim Wenders' Until the End of the World and Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days. Ultimately, Reminiscence slogs to it's conclusion, gussied up in an overwrought design and effects budget, both overwritten and underperformed.
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