[Cecil Terwilliger]

Free Guy was ok. Amazing first half but the second half dragged at times and didn’t quite live up to the awesome premise.

They didn’t develop the real world characters. I didn’t care about the non-Ryan Reynolds characters at all, the video game plot or the romance plot. I did care about Ryan Reynolds but as the movie progressed, they seemed to lose the tension over who we were supposed to care about.

Spoiler!

Was I supposed to care about their game success? Because I didn’t care at all about either of these characters. We had no connection to them or the hard work they out into their game.

What about the weird, last minute romance between the two? Came out of nowhere, made no sense and I didn’t care about it at all. More like he’s a creep who made her an AI stalker based on his own obsession. Felt like that Black Mirror episode with Todd from BB.

I spent the first half of the movie feeling for Ryan Reynolds and they just ditched that and went for the Grandma’s Boy storyline. Then, nope, it’s back to caring about Guy again.

They should have picked one goal and stuck with it. We spent the first 45 minutes getting to know Guy but then his survival as the first ever fully sentient AI character takes a back seat to their video game sales. Those goals feel completely at odds. Either AI are real people or their IP needs to be protected. Going for both seemed dumb.

Having just finished Westworld s3, there was some great potential to make a touching yet fun action comedy and instead they played it same by adding in the entire bad boss storyline, which I’ll mention again felt like a complete rehash of Grandmas Boy.

Or they should have totally abandoned the AI angle and gone for something more lighthearted, like having Guy save their code. But then it should have been the real world characters who got the character development so that we cared about their success.

Fun but ultimately wasted a ton of potential. 6/10