The movie business is about as manoeuvrable as a 19th-century steamship. Ask any marginalized group and they’ll tell you about the dearth of movies that represent them. Hell, it’s only been in the last few years that we’ve seen more female directors heading up major studio movies. 

It would be silly to equate efforts to increase representation at the movies and the depiction of gamer culture, but traditionally Hollywood has shown about as much careful observation of the people who play video games as they have of any social group, which is to say: not much at all. Whether it’s a direct adaptation of an in-game story or a scene of a person at a PC or console, most movies seem stuck on the idea of gamers being overweight mother’s-basement dwellers. The reality of a multi-billion-dollar industry, with professional leagues and celebrity influencers, eludes the screenwriters and studio execs who think that a DVD-by-mail company is the only one eating their lunch.

With Free Guy, star Ryan Reynolds and director Shawn Levy make a heroic effort to right some “wrongs”. The movie gets closer than most to capturing the truth of massively multiplayer online gaming, both in the games itself and in the toxic workplaces where they’re made. Happily, the movie isn’t obsessed with sneering at gaming as a loser activity, but it can’t get completely clear of screenwriting shortcuts designed to artificially generate drama. It’s also scared to fully engage with the existential questions posed by its premise, no matter how much Reynolds’ usual wisecracking schtick tries to distract us.

The bulk of the action takes place in the world of a blockbuster game called Free City, clearly modelled after Grand Theft Auto, with bits of Fortnite and other franchises mixed in. Guy (Reynolds) is a non-playable character, or NPC, who works in a bank where one of the game’s heist missions takes place. Guy lives in a daily loop eerily similar to that of Chris Pratt’s character Emmet in The Lego Movie: he gets up, wears the same clothes, gets his coffee and heads to his job with a permanent grin and an optimistic catchphrase. Meanwhile, violent digital anarchy plays out around him, but Guy doesn’t know any other life.

Here to shake him out of his reverie is a player known as “molotovgirl”, named Millie (Jodie Comer) in the real world. Millie is a high-level player who’s not in the game to have fun. She’s searching for evidence that the developer of Free City (a deliciously selfish Taika Waititi) stole the base code for the game from Millie’s indie company. However, her encounter with Guy sparks his character to begin to evolve within the game, sending both of them on a quest to test the real boundary between the game and life beyond the server.

The movie obviously revels in depicting the mayhem of a GTA-style game, and constructs elaborate set pieces around game physics, ridiculous weapons and items, and the grinding that some players undertake to level up. But there’s roughly a 80/20 accuracy split; the bulk of the observations line up, but every so often there’s a painfully awkward trope. You get shots of people in a cafe watching gameplay footage on an ancient tube TV and a sequence where sabotaged servers delete the game world in just the right way to allow the hero to make a last-second leap. The producers even recruit some real gaming influencers like Pokimane, Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, and Jacksepticeye to deliver over-earnest pieces to camera, a decision that feels more like product placement than a nod to fans.

If the premise is that Reynolds is playing a barely-programmed NPC, he also pulls it off in a meta sense, since he barely deviates from his familiar, sarcastic routine. If you like it, it’s entertaining, but don’t expect anything deeper. This is especially noticeable at the end, where the implication is that Guy achieves some kind of Nobel-Prize-worthy sentience. Guy’s urge to escape his game and see what’s beyond is satisfied by just going to a different, less rule-bound level. Guy apparently didn’t need love, just to have a few mods installed.

Free Guy owes most of its dramatic inspiration to The Truman Show and John Carpenter’s They Live, albeit with injections of corporate megalomania from Ready Player One. If Steven Spielberg’s film - which already toned down the more disgusting aspects of Ernest Cline’s source novel - grossed you out, Free Guy isn’t much better. But if you’re looking for a movie that “gets gaming right”, Free Guy is for you. My conspiracy theory, though, is that the producers are only playing nice with gamers to try to rebuild the industry, post-COVID. Free Guy may just be a skin.

Free Guy gets two and a half stars out of four.

Stray thoughts

• Jodie Comer is entirely believable in both her roles: the hard-core in-game warrior and the game developer.

• This movie suggests that a certain Marvel cast member is an asshole who watches gameplay content in a coffee shop with no headphones.