“Free Guy”, Big-Budget Movies and Diluted Homage

To the surprise of anyone who was subjected to its many trailers and delay announcements, Free Guy, a movie in which Ryan Reynolds discovers he's actually a character in a Grand-Theft-Auto-esque video game, was released to positive reviews last month. The movie is set in a digital sandbox where life's mundane annoyances have been replaced with constant bank heists and carjackings. That may sound like a 2011 YouTube skit, but upon the film's release, it received flattering comparisons to another "my world isn't real" movie, The Truman Show. Drawing a parallel between the two films sends a specific message: sure, Free Guy may seem like Disney's attempt to cash in on Fortnite and the online video game craze, but there's actually something deeper and more serious hiding beneath.

Photo: 20th Century Studios

The notion of a truly interesting movie "hiding" within a major blockbuster says a lot about the state of the industry. It's no secret that theaters have been dominated by massive tentpole releases, a huge number of which are made by Disney. Now that superhero movies with $250 million budgets have become the norm, it's only natural that critics and audiences who remember when this wasn’t the case want to make themselves feel better about the films they go see. And what better way than to assert that what may feel like a soulless product is in fact the worthy heir to an older, beloved piece of art.

This kind of thinking is how Captain America: The Winter Soldier became talked about as an homage to the great political thrillers of the 70s. This was one of the earliest examples of critics attempting to legitimize Marvel movies and their box-office domination. The idea was that a superhero movie had transcended its "cape and tights" image to deliver messages about complex, real-world themes. It was time to stop being a snob and recognize that Marvel films had become important, grown-up movies that you could enjoy guilt-free.

Here's the issue: the politics of The Winter Soldier don't come close to the paranoid intensity of movies like Three Days of the Condor or The Parallax View. It is, like all Marvel movies, attempting to be as politically neutral as possible so as not to alienate any viewers. It focuses on an evil, fictional organization hell-bent on world domination that infiltrates the good, equally fictional organization that Captain America works for. If that sounds like a plot designed for middle schoolers, that’s because it is. The movie’s spy-turned-fugitive plot is derivative of countless post-Bourne action movies, and its connections to 70s thrillers seem to stop and end with the casting of Robert Redford. In the end, it’s just another competently made CGI-fest, ending on an explosion-filled battle atop a flying aircraft carrier called a “helicarrier.” What, you don’t remember the helicarrier scene from All the President’s Men?

There’s a long list of blockbusters that are written about as homages to classic films and subgenres. Joker was a reconfiguration of Taxi Driver and King of Comedy. The Tom Holland Spider-Man movies are tributes to John Hughes films like The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles (They’re all set in high-school, get it?). Iron-Man 3 was a buddy-cop movie. Solo: A Star Wars Story was a western. Think that Ant-Man was just another superhero story? According to its director, Peyton Reed, it was actually a heist movie.

If you were to buy into this mode of thinking, you’d believe that filmmakers are always deftly sneaking their unique and highly-specific visions into these pieces of popcorn entertainment. Auteurism isn’t dead, it just has a slick-new computer generated sheen!

Of course, Disney isn’t always so kind to unique perspectives. Ant-Man’s original director, Edgar Wright, ended up dropping out of the production when his ideas didn’t gel with the plans of Marvel producers. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the highly successful duo behind Lego Movie and 21 Jump Street, were fired from Solo: A Star Wars Story due to creative differences. Rogue One, Mulan, Black Widow, and a whole host of other Disney movies reportedly underwent significant reshoots. It’s not just Disney; the panicked reshoots and reedits of Suicide Squad, Justice League, and New Mutants have become the stuff of legend.

Still, it’s incredibly tempting to write as if a blockbuster serves as a Trojan Horse containing smaller, more compelling movies. In a previous article on this very website, I called the Wolverine film Logan a modern western. Even while typing it, I knew it wasn’t true. Or, at the very least, it was an exaggeration. Yes, Logan wears its debt to movies about aging gunslingers on its sleeve, even having its characters watch scenes from the classic western Shane. But in order for Logan to be made, it had to rely on audiences recognizing Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine from several X-Men films. It also had to include several scenes of pumped-up superhero action and violence. Without the existing franchise or the emphasis on setpieces, a movie as mournful as Logan would have flopped. General audiences would likely have no patience for something as meditative as any of Clint Eastwood’s late-career westerns.

Everyone who gets involved in filmmaking does so because they were inspired and moved by great movies. Often, these movies were born out of a sensibility that seems outdated and quaint in the current climate. Thanks to growing budgets and the drive to create franchises, the kinds of bold and innovative stories that electrified Hollywood in the 1970s are almost never made on a large scale. Studios are frightened. When movies cost a quarter-billion dollars just to get made, that fear is justified. So, instead of honestly evoking the classics of yesteryear, filmmakers resort to including references and surface-level plot points that create the illusion that what you’re seeing is reminiscent of something better you’ve seen before.

There’s nothing wrong with popcorn entertainment or superhero stories. The Sam Raimi Spider-Man trilogy, for example, creatively grapples with resonant, universal themes that transcend the action and spectacle on display. That’s also not to say anything negative about action and spectacle; edge-of-your-seat car chases and expertly choreographed fight scenes account for some of the finest sequences in all of movie history.

Many modern Disney movies are good. A few are great. But is Free Guy as good as The Truman Show? No, of course not. The two movies barely exist on the same plane of existence. So when the director of Shang-Chi, Destin Daniel Cretton, says that the film was inspired by Ip Man and golden age Hong Kong action cinema, it’s safe to say that it won’t be giving any Martial Arts classics a run for their money. This doesn’t mean it won’t be a fun, engaging movie, but it’s healthy to take a step back and see things for how they are. Studios are asking for your time and money with everything they release, so don’t be fooled into thinking that what they’re offering you is more substantive than it really is. You deserve better.