All month long, IGN Premiere is spotlighting some of the biggest upcoming releases in entertainment. Today, we have an exclusive action scene from the video game-themed film Free Guy, starring Ryan Reynolds and Jodie Comer.
Director Shawn Levy’s upcoming action-comedy revolves around Reynolds’ bank teller Guy, an NPC in a raucous GTA-style, open-world shooter game called Free City who rebels against his programming. But while Guy is the heart of the movie and the focus of the story, Free Guy doesn’t take place wholly within the realm of a video game. The movie sees “real world” characters, such as Jodie Comer’s Millie Rusk enter the game as avatars.
Millie is out to determine who stole her code for Free City and, as her badass avatar Molotov Girl, she comes into contact with Guy. In this IGN Premiere exclusive clip — which you can view via the player above or the embed below — Molotov Girl and Guy infiltrate one particularly secure location in Free City in order to acquire a much needed digital clue, a mission that sees them engage in some, ahem, mortal combat with those securing it.
As Comer explained to IGN and other press visiting the set in June 2019: “What’s wonderful is Molotov meets Guy within the video world and he doesn’t realize that he is an algorithm. He thinks his life has this greater meaning, as we all do. And it’s about how these two people who are from completely separate worlds kind of help each other realize a lot of what is inside of them. And they help each other both get to the kind of destination it is that they need to be at.”
Initially, though, Millie/Molotov is “dismissive” of Guy, a background character in her coding she normally wouldn’t give a second thought to until she realizes something is amiss in her game. “It’s not until she senses some kind of abnormalities within the world and how people are reacting to things that she then engages with him,” Comer explained, “and that continues to grow throughout the movie.”
Reynolds’ Guy, it should be noted, is only gradually becoming aware that he’s an NPC. As far as he knows, Free City is just a perpetually, predictably violent place. But he will soon discover his life isn’t what he thought it was.
“In a video game world where anything is possible, if you become aware of the artifice of your world, you might be capable of anything. So it’s about the slow empowerment,” Levy explained during IGN’s set visit, while also likening the film to a superhero origin story. “That [obscene amount of daily violence] is the norm for Guy until he realizes that maybe this should not be my normal. It’s kind of an awakening of consciousness and he develops agency over his own existence.”
As Reynolds sees it, Free Guy is less about the video game it depicts but rather the characters who inhabit it: “We’re using the video game world, the Free City world and video game culture, as a sort of a vehicle to tell this really beautiful and powerful human story.” As Levy later put it, “the big theme of this movie is that Ryan’s character’s trying to be a good guy inside the city where goodness doesn’t exist.”
Free Guy opens exclusively in theaters on August 13 in the US and UK and on August 12 in Australia.
Disclosure: IGN has a presence in the movie including an appearance by former staffer Terri Schwartz.
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