Taika Waititi’s directorial career has been so very good ( Jojo Rabbit , Thor: Ragnarok , What We Do in the Shadows ) that it feels churlish to complain about how he’s arguably under-utilised as an actor (even though he has roles in each of the aforementioned films).
However, you won’t find too many complaints about Waititi’s cartoonishly villainous turn in Shawn Levy’s action comedy Free Guy (now available on Hotstar in India). His character Antwan, lead developer at the fictional Soonami Corporation, is a delightful caricature of a certain kind of male creator seemingly ubiquitous in the video gaming world — arrogant, standoffish, revels in putting people down, the ultimate bully-among-nerds.
Having stolen the code of prodigal programmers Millie Rusk (Jodie Comer) and Walter McKey (Joe Keery), Antwan twists their vision of a ‘fish tank’ gaming world (where players watch different non-playing-characters (NPCs) interacting with each other instead of shooting at them) into yet another assembly line ‘shoot-’em-up’ called, ironically, Free City. However, McKey and Rusk’s code leads to an NPC called Blue Shirt Guy (Ryan Reynolds) breaking free from his coding and becoming the world’s first truly self-aware AI (artificial intelligence).
Inside out
The film’s central conflict is Millie and Guy teaming up to find proof of Antwan’s wrongdoings before he uses his absolute control over Free City to erase his footprints.
Free Guy is hardly the only film/ TV show in recent times to centre on (and critique) the world of video games. The direct-to-video martial arts star Scott Adkins starred as the titular character in the delightful action comedy Max Cloud last year. Max Cloud had a Tron -like setup where a teenage girl is stuck inside the interstellar world of the video game she’s playing — which is to say, the world of Max Cloud, the hero.
But Cloud himself turns out to be a male chauvinist, plus haughty and pig-headed to boot. How a gaming superfan learns to temper her adoration for this world forms the crux of the story — along the way, lots of silly conventions of the gaming world are critiqued, like the way female characters are given gruesome deaths in order to spur the (male) hero into action (a practice called ‘fridging’).
Toxic culture
Adkins is brilliant in the fight sequences as always, but surprisingly, he is also a hoot and a half when being cut to size by his teenaged sidekick. Max Cloud works because its affection for its framing world (i.e. the world of gaming) is not all-consuming and does not blunt its critical edge. The Japanese Netflix show Alice in Borderland is also set in a ‘gamified’ version of modern-day Tokyo and takes inspiration, among other things, from the American McGee’s Alice video game (that itself combines steampunk aesthetics with the world of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland ).
Free Guy is ultimately a Disney film, a classic family adventure. So, the critical overtures aren’t as sharp as in some of the other stories discussed in this column. But it does land the occasional punch, and with good reason. The gaming industry has undergone something of a reckoning these past few years. The online part of the MeToo movement, after all, had its origins in the ‘GamerGate’ fiasco from 2014-15, when coordinated groups of male gamers targetted female developers like Brianna Wu and feminist critics like Anita Sarkeesian (who ran a video series called ‘Tropes vs. Women in Video Games’).
In July 2021, the State of California filed a lawsuit against Activision Blizzard (the makers of blockbuster video game franchises like Warcraft and Diablo ) after a two-year-long investigation, alleging gender-based discrimination and harassment. Dozens of female ex-employees spoke up about their experiences at Blizzard; they said Blizzard was complicit in promoting a male-dominated, misogynist workplace culture.
Clearly, things have reached a cultural tipping point in the world of video games. Films like Free Guy and Max Cloud are reactions to the waning public support enjoyed by billion-dollar corporations like Blizzard. Expect more over-the-top villains like Antwan, although I get the feeling that the next one may not be as funny as Waititi.
Aditya Mani Jha is a writer and journalist working on his first book of non-fiction.
