Free Guy
Gillipedia Official Rating: I watched
this movie for free, guy
I always feel a little hypocritical
when I say a movie is for free on Disney+. That of course is with the caveat of
having a subscription. And yes, I am paying using my own subscription. Netflix on the other hand...
Free Guy to me is like the poor
man’s The Lego Movie. You have the every-happy protagonist that goes
through the same routine every day without a care in the world. They spot their
eyes on the girl of their dreams and try to follow them. This leads them
towards a path of self-discovery realizing that they’re a part of a world that
is out of their control. For our Free Guy protagonist Ryan Reynolds,
that means being an NPC (non-playable character) inside a popular videogame.
The movie is clever in making a quick distinction between players and NPCs by
having players wear sunglasses. This also allows Guy to then take sunglasses
and get a glimpse of the world from the player’s perspective. As he begins to
understand his role in everything, the plot really begins of his quest to find
the girl and figure out who he is.
If I wasn’t clear enough before, let
me reiterate: Free Guy isn’t as good as The Lego Movie. Where I
consider the latter to be a laughs-a-minute, quick paced film with colorful
characters and a nice familial theme, the former is entertaining with some
laughs, but not much below the surface. The Lego Movie figured out how
to tie in their clever concept with a family friendly message that plays out
gloriously in the climax. Free Guy gets past the pitch meeting of, “What
if our main character is the character that no one pays attention to—the NPC?”
but can’t get beyond that. Guy’s goal is to -cough- be free from the
constraints of his programming… And that’s basically it. It doesn’t get any
deeper than that.
But this isn’t a terrible film by any
stretch. It’s actually pretty entertaining. They combine Guy’s narrative
journey with the main plot involving the CEO of the company (Thor Ragnarok director Taika Waititi) behind the
videogame having stolen some code from the two developers that initially programmed
the game. It’s a smart approach to introduce conflict between the two worlds
and how they can interact with each other. It will keep the movie moving
forward, but don’t expect any major plot twists or anything.
Sometimes the visuals are really
impressive, and sometimes they’re the quality of, well, a videogame. Of course,
some of this is completely intentional. I’m just not sure how much is. I think
some of it runs into that rubbery physics quality whenever a person has to
perform an action that a normal human can’t do, and it doesn’t feel right.
Also, I was disappointed by the lack
of variety. The overall game world feels like a toned down GTA which is
perfectly understandable for a film that is mostly family-friendly PG-13 fun,
but there aren’t too many locales beyond the cityscape where Guy lives and
works. They had some fun like with a fight where the characters can only punch
and kick in a couple motions—like how fighting programming would be—but there
isn’t enough to really wow you.
This film doesn’t take itself too
seriously at all, and if you’re good with watching a movie that requires little
brain power, then you’ll be perfectly entertained by Free Guy.
Encanto
Gillipedia Official Rating: The best
thing to come out of Columbia since… uh… I don’t know enough Columbian products
to make a clever comparison. So. Yeah, there you go.
Not that it needs to be said, but I’ll
be honest. This film came out and I let it pass by without much fuss. Now that
it’s (paid subscription) free, I relented and watched. And my thoughts are
mostly positive. This is by no stretch the best Disney film, but it’s still a
solid showing.
Lin-Manuel Miranda was heavily
involved with the music, and it’s some of his best stuff. These songs are
really catchy. I also appreciated the music video vibes the scenes were giving
off. This movie plays around a bunch with colors and lighting, and it also
excels in the physical animation both in how the characters move, but also how
their faces express. This is truly some of the most nuanced character
expressions I’ve seen in an animated film. Some of the dance moves may feel a
bit Tik Tok-y, but it’s still very fluid and better than I can dance, that’s
for sure.
There’s also a lot of characters. And
that first song was sung really fast. I did not catch every word and
missed out on the introductions to plenty relatives. One thing that I have
probably mentioned in the past and only very slightly alluded to in the Free
Guy review is the fact that one of the easiest ways to obtain an emotional
resonance from your audience is to have the plot revolve around familial
conflict. It's one of the easiest and most effective ways to be relatable. I’m
not saying there’s anything wrong with that, but Encanto leans heavily
into this. And you can tell they make a real effort for relatability. Our main
character -gasps- wears glasses! And she’s not even a nerd! Groundbreaking, I
know, but—also relatable.
The issue Encanto runs into is
the focus on the abilities of the family and Abuela’s insistent reminder to our
hero that she doesn’t have a special ability so step aside to let the other
people do their work. This leads to a predictable climax and theme, but it’s
still well done. That’s not my complaint. My issue is that there’s not much
more to the characters than their abilities. Girl that controls weather with
her emotions has mood swings, mom that heals people with her cooking is always
tender and feeding people, and so on. There is a character or two that shows
more emotions down the road, but it’s played more as a plot twist than
anything.
There’s one other aspect I really want
to touch on. Brookly Nine-Nine fans may be excited to see the very own
Rosa, played by Stephanie Beatriz, voice the main character. And real fans will
know that Beatriz’s real voice is way closer to what she does in Encanto
than in the show. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean she has the best singing
voice. And this is pretty consistent through the cast. Everyone is good, but I
don’t think any voice shines. Despite not the best vocal talent, I do want to
repeat that the songs are very catchy.
I’d take Moana over Encanto
any day. I’d also take Frozen 2. If people stop you in the middle of a
hallway to let you know that Encanto is the best Disney movie, know that
they’re lying. But colorful and technically exquisite animation and really
catchy songs makes this a perfectly fine addition to the catalogue.
The 355
Gillipedia Official Rating: A
confusing mess
This movie sucks.
The End
Please don’t bother with this one. It
has an awesome cast but one of the least logical scripts and a terrible
director/editor. There are gaping plot holes and leaps in logic and nonsensical
action scenes.
So one rule of thumb I have when it
comes to action is thinking to myself, “Is there a stunt that I remember from
this movie?” And thinking back to The 355, nothing comes to mind. Except
maybe for the fact that they play up that since the heroes are women and they
fight a lot of men, they kick them in the nuts a bunch. But it also cuts away
so frequently that you won’t see a single stunt completed to fruition in a
single shot. Also, the gun shooting is incredibly fake. There’s no recoil, the
bullets are endless, and the aiming is -insert stormtrooper metaphor- really
bad. Also also, sometimes they take cover, but there are enough times that they shoot at each other in open space that you would think someone, anyone, would get shot. It's like when you're talking and say "um" while you think of what to say next. They shoot their little bullets, nothing happens, so they move on to what needs to happen next.
Going back to the cast, we have our
star Jessica Chastain, the always amazing Diane Kruger, Penelope Cruz providing
the best acting out of the bunch, Lupita Nyong’o, and let’s also throw
Sebastian Stan in there too. The plot revolves around a new piece of tech that can do
everything from crashing planes to blacking out cities to delaying Prime
shipments by a business day on a Friday. The female leads mostly represent spy
organizations for their respective organizations (Cruz plays the vulnerable of
the bunch by declaring multiple times that she’s only a therapist); and they
continuously foil the bad guys’ plans, but since they get in each other’s way,
they beat each other up instead. Then, they kiss and makeup and become buddy
buddy to go after the bad guys again.
They’re all also incredible at finding
each other and the bad guys. When there isn’t an action scene, it typically
goes like, “Hey, this dude here is a bad guy. We need to find him and stop him.”
And then they find them with no
effort. This incredible tracking extends to the action scenes. There’s a lot of
chasing that happens, and the characters always find who or where they need to
go, first time every time. And just to linger on this further, there were entire
sections of roughly 30 seconds where I legitimately did not know where a
character was, who was fighting, or what was happening. You might get .5
seconds to see a character turn and shoot, then it cuts to the character being
shot at that will duck, then they will dash to a new place, and then it repeats but in a new
location. Possibly? I’m not sure. But I think that’s what kept happening.
My disdain for this movie comes
from a completely forgettable plot and atrocious action. The cast is superb,
but outside of Cruz, the characters are pretty one-note and the poor writing
and terrible directing all work against what these talented actresses can bring
to the table. If you want to skip this film, I’m more than happy to summarize
it for you: All men are evil, and the people go pew pew a lot.
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