Weekend Watch: Free Guy, And CODA
Ryan Reynolds asks you to hate the players, not the game, while a young woman juggles music and her deaf family.
Image Credit: 20th Century Studios
Welcome to the latest edition of Weekend Watch, in which I recommend (or occasionally warn against) movies or TV shows I’ve been checking out. This week, Ryan Reynolds discovers his life is a lie and a young woman is caught between a promising musical future and family obligations. Follow James on Twitter: @jamwhite
Free Guy might be an original story (i.e., not based on any comic book, novel, grocery list, or a remake of another movie or show), but it’s not exactly truly original, since it’s essentially a cocktail of Ready Player One, The Truman Show, Wreck-It Ralph, The Matrix and more. That’s not to say it’s a bad film, by any stretch of the imagination. And it does at least have a few ideas on its mind.
Mostly, however, it’s the story of Guy (Ryan Reynolds, partly in Deadpool snark mode, partly in the guileless hero style he used to employ in some rom-coms), who learns that his hum-drum life is because he’s an NPC (non-playable character) in the wildly violent San Andreas-alike game Free City. Guy spends his days working at a bank with best pal Buddy (Lil Rel Howery), a place that is robbed daily by sunglass-clad weirdoes. Slowly starting to question all this, Guy’s search for answers is accelerated when he meets Molotov Girl (Jodie Comer), AKA Millie, a player from the real world outside the game who has a much more personal connection to it than simply shooting guns and stealing cars. She’s on her own mission, and her target is the game’s smarmy overseer, Antoine (Taika Waititi).
Shawn Levy, still best known for directing the Night At The Museum movies (and being a prolific producer with credits on everything from Stranger Things to Arrival), has figured out exactly how to make this sort of film work to a level that might not be perfect, but knows what it aims to achieve. He’s an old hand at marshalling effects and gets the most out of the cartoony game world, while still using it all to power (and power up) the story. Reynolds has settled into a familiar pattern of relatability and subversive comedy, though here the seams do begin to show a little bit more than they usually do in Deadpool’s world. Comer, meanwhile, is typically great, proving that she can be the quirky, cold Villanelle of Killing Eve and the more earnest Millie here. The world around them gets plenty of mileage out of the video game concept, while never forgetting to spend time with Guy, Millie, and her fellow game developer Keys (Joe Keery).
The biggest problem with the film is it doesn’t quite know how to handle Waititi. The actor/writer/director seemingly squeezed this in between 10 other assignments and while he does his riffing best to bring the character to life, he comes across much more annoying than the loveable likes of Korg or even Hitler from Jojo Rabbit. Yes, he’s supposed to be a thoughtless idiot, but his real crime is he’s just not all that fun and feels more like the sort of nitwit that Silicon Valley’s writers would create and then reject as being too shallow.
Zero wheels are re-invented here, but don’t let that stop you from diving into Guy’s world and going on the quest with him. And refreshingly for a film set in a game world, you don’t find yourself wishing you were playing it.
Free Guy will be in US and UK cinemas on Friday.
Image Credit: Apple TV+
Making waves at this year’s Sundance Film Festival by winning a clutch of trophies (including both the Audience Award and Grand Jury Prize), CODA completed the festival ideal when Apple swooped in and bought it for a record-breaking $25 million. It’s not hard to see why.
Sian Heder’s film is the story of Ruby Rossi (Emilia Jones), the sole hearing member of a deaf family – a CODA, child of deaf adults. Her life revolves around acting as an interpreter for her parents (Marlee Matlin’s Jackie and Troy Kotsur’s Frank) and working on the family's struggling fishing boat every day before school with her father and older brother Leo (Daniel Durant). But when Ruby joins her high school’s choir club, she discovers a gift for singing and soon finds herself drawn to her duet partner Miles (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo). Encouraged by her enthusiastic, tough-love choirmaster Bernardo Villalobos (Eugenio Derbez) to apply to the prestigious, Boston-based Berklee College of Music, Ruby finds herself torn between the obligations she feels to her family and the pursuit of her own dreams.
Jones gives a performance that is by turns luminous, grounded, and funny, finding much to work with as she charts Ruby’s conflicted life. She’s always watchable, and of course, she can sing given that her real-life father is UK singer and radio/TV presenter Aled Jones. Breathing real life into Ruby, she’s endlessly convincing, including the accent.
Around her, the cast is great to a tee, with the standouts being Matlin and Kotsur as her parents. Still deeply in love after two decades of marriage, the pair squabbles and has sex on a regular basis, something that causes no end of embarrassment for Ruby, especially when she brings Miles home. Those who have an issue with subtitles can shove their feelings aside to enjoy this one – that or learn American Sign Language to enhance the experience. Derbez, meanwhile, struts and supports in equal measure as Ruby’s choirmaster.
If the film falters at all, it’s in the slow-burn romance between Ruby and Miles; no fault of the pair: the script for that storyline just feels more like a cookie-cutter indie movie track that brings little that is innovative to the story. A shame, since so much about it feels fresh and interesting, the dynamics between Ruby and her parents in particular.
We’re still at a point where feel-good films are truly necessary and spending nearly two hours in CODA’s world is a recommended experience.
CODA is on limited UK and US cinemas and on Apple TV+ in the States from Friday.