Plot Summary – When a bank teller discovers he’s actually a background player in an open-world video game, he decides to become the hero of his own story — one that he can rewrite himself. In a world where there’s no limits, he’s determined to save the day his way before it’s too late, and maybe find a little romance with the coder who conceived him.

★★★½ 

Watched on 06 Mar 2022

I got to this movie very late which means I’ve heard an inexplicable amount of discourse about the movie months before I’d watched it. I had friends telling me that it’s a really fun time, all the critics I love and admire were dunking on it and some were calling it terrible, some of the YouTubers I watched said it was mediocre and unremarkable. There was so much noise surrounding this film that I was really intimidated by it. It felt bigger than it actually was. Nobody I know gave it 5 stars or anything but I certainly expected it to be enjoyable. It does deliver on that front and it is an insanely enjoyable and entertaining movie. I can’t say I was bored for a single minute. Yet, it feels like a let-down because it wasn’t ‘the most fun I’ve had in a movie in years’ as some of my friends described it. This is going to sound lame, but maybe that’s because I am not engaged in gaming as much? I don’t know but there were no cheering moments or laugh out loud jokes or smiling from ear-to-ear moments, it was just enough to keep my engaged. That’s when I started to realize the other side of the debate, those who hate the movie hate it because it feels so engineered to perfection to evoke the perfect response from the greatest common denominator and yet some were unfazed. My 13-year-old brother absolutely loved this movie. He watched it this winter and I heard hooting and cheering at his laptop screen or laughing so hard he snorted his cranberry juice from his nose. That’s when I realized that it is capable of evoking such a reaction but I’ve come to expect more from the film. I had a great internal debate about whether the point of a film is to entertain or to say something. I’ve argued with my mom on the phone for hours, with friends who replied to my reviews on Instagram and with random people on Reddit (not very proud) about what the overall purpose of the film is and what constitutes a ‘good film’. Cause by all standards, this is a good film. It has serviceable cinematography, cool aesthetic, charismatic performances, a decent enough script and an exciting premise. That sounds like I’m describing a really good movie and yet there’s something missing. There’s something hollow. Something doesn’t click, and it makes the film feel so manufactured. I can’t believe this movie exists and yet I have no idea how it already hadn’t. A movie hasn’t thrown me for a loop as much as this one in a long time. Usually, I am very clear about what I feel about a film but I can see my opinions changing as I write this review in fact. This movie is so simple that there is nothing to think about when it’s done, and yet here I am spending an hour after watching the movie thinking about it. It’s absolute madness and absolute genius and I can’t wrap my head around it. Watch Free Guy if you want to have a good time but I implore you not to think about it when you’re done unless you want to have an internal crisis about the meaning of Kino like I did.