Video game movies have a terrible track record but they do seem to be getting better. This one has as video gamey a theme as you can imagine and it’s a surprisingly fun and effective action movie. I credit this to Ryan Reynolds’ enthusiasm for the project as this fits perfectly with the comedic persona he has cultivated. Of course this isn’t to be considered a serious science-fiction film as there is no consistency at all to the rules of the world and video game development definitely does not work like that. But the world has been begging for a video game movie like this for ages and this does deliver.

Guy is a happy-go-lucky bank teller who retains his positive attitude despite the unusually high incidence of violence in the city he lives in, including multiple bank robberies per day. Unbeknownst to him and his friends, they are actually NPCs in an MMORPG where players, distinguished by wearing sunglasses, are free to kill, rob, and generally destroy anything. One day he runs into a player who he thinks is the girl of his dreams and starts breaking out of his routines. He obtains a pair of sunglasses from another player and starts being able to interact with the game layer. The girl is actually the in-game avatar of Millie Rusk, who with her partner Keys developed the predecessor of the Free City game. Keys now works for Antwan, the current owner of the company behind Free City. Millie believes that Antwan’s game illegally reuses their original code and wants to prove it. Guy runs into Millie again when she tries to steal the evidence from in-game stash house. Thinking that he is a novice player, she advises him to level-up first. He duly does so by performing good deeds and becomes an online viral sensation known as Blue Shirt Guy.

This film is a love letter to modern gamers who will recognize all of the tropes, exaggerated violence and character archetypes it is crammed full of. It even features cameo appearances by real gamers and streamers who comment on Blue Shirt Guy’s rise to fame. The CGI here is actually not that realistic but I suppose that is a deliberate artistic choice to highlight the inherent artifice of a video game world. It does look good enough for the stunts to look cool and this is the one place where I suppose video game logic can be forgiven. The same goes for the lack of emotional impact in the action scenes as we know it isn’t real and Guy can just respawn whenever he dies. The point is just to look slick and awesome and it does that entertainingly well. There are multiple references to familiar bits of pop culture including the use of popular music which can be cringe-inducing if badly handled. But I’d say that the usage is well-judged here. They aren’t casual throwaway references but are instead well-timed for critical moments.

My main problem with this film is that the real world layer feels almost as fake as the video game world. I think it would have been more interesting to have the real world feel grimy and gritty but here it’s just as slick and shallow. Taika Waititi who plays Antwan looks like he belongs in a music video and his horrible overacting is not amusing to me at all. Needless to say nothing about the plot of needing to expose Antwan’s reuse of code makes sense. Worst of all, I detect a subtle undercurrent of mocking the hobby of playing video games itself. The film’s ending message seems to be that the only way to win is not to play at all and wants to point out that violence in games is fundamentally unethical. Perhaps that conclusion is inescapable given that you are killing intelligent characters but then they’re not really being killed as they respawn so does that matter? I suppose it’s best not to overthink the philosophical considerations but I still feel that the makers of this film hold a condescending attitude towards games. This contrasts with the tone of Wreck-It Ralph films which is about classic old games and therefore treats them with more reverence.

I still liked this as an effective action movie with a video game theme and to be fair there is plenty in the video game industry that is unethical and deserves mockery. It is appropriately modern and like so much of Reynolds’ recent work, the humor works very well. It is however not a terribly intelligent film and its depiction of how video games are made is just as much a fantasy as the in-game scenes.