Movie reviews: 'Free Guy' tackles meaning of life with humour, heart, and Reynolds' brand of irreverence

This image released by 20th Century Studios shows Ryan Reynolds in a scene from "Free Guy." (20th Century Studios via AP)

FREE GUY: 3 ½ STARS

“Free Guy,” the new Ryan Reynolds action comedy now playing in theatres, has its philosophical moments, but no one will confuse its search for the meaning of life with the explorations of Joseph Campbell or Socrates. This is pure pop philosophy that breathes the same air as “The Truman Show” and “Edtv,” movies about men who yearn for more than life has offered them.

Reynolds is Guy, a bank teller in Free City, a video game metropolis where the main characters wear sunglasses, have devil-may-care attitudes, cool hair and treat laws as suggestions, not hard and fast rules. Everyone else, including Guy and his best friend Buddy (Lil Rel Howery), are NPC, non-player-characters, who exist simply to give the Sunglasses People someone to rob, beat down, or, in rare cases, flirt with.

They are set decoration in the grand videogame of life.

“People with sunglasses never talk to people like us,” Buddy says.

One day Guy’s orderly life is thrown a curve when he spots Molotov Girl (Jodie Comer), a gunslinging sunglasses person, who also happen to be the woman of his dreams. Consumed with feelings he has never had before; his behaviours change as he looks for love and meaning in his life.

“Maybe I’ll get some sunglasses of my own,” he says.

IRL (In Real Life) Millie (also played by Comer) and Keys (Joe Keery) are former coding superstars whose idea for a videogame that would actually change and grow independently of its users was stolen by evil videogame developer Antoine (Taika Waititi). Keys now works for Antoine, while Millie is obsessed with infiltrating the game as Molotov Girl to get evidence for her lawsuit against the obnoxious tech giant.

Soon the line between Guy’s algorithmic life and Millie’s quest blend as “Free Guy” asks, “Do you you have to be a spectator in your own life?”

You need a lot of hyphens to describe “Free Guy.” It’s a videogame-rom com-satire-action-comedy that tackles, in a lighthearted way, questions that people had grappled with for thousands of years.

“What is the meaning of life?” Guy asks. “What if nothing matters.”

But don’t fret, this isn’t Camus. The nihilism that usually goes along with big questions about life is replaced with videogame action and brewing romance.

Reynolds brings his trademarked way with a line to play man child Guy. He’s the definition of bright-eyed-and-bushy-tailed, able to give Guy the naïve quality he would have as someone just coming to consciousness, driven by feelings he doesn’t understand, as it slowly dawns on him that he is free to make his own decisions.

Comer, best known for her Emmy Award winning work in “Killing Eve,” deftly hops between real life and Free City, creating two characters with a shared goal. She’s there mostly as a sounding board for Guy’s awakening, but Comer brings personality to both roles.

Ultimately “Free Guy” doesn’t teach us anything about life we couldn’t have learned from any number of episodes of “Oprah,” but the message that life doesn’t have to be something that just happens to us is delivered with a heaping helping of humour, heart and Reynold’s brand of irreverence.

RESPECT: 3 ½ STARS

Two years ago, the documentary “Amazing Grace” showcased Aretha Franklin's remarkable 1972 two-night stand at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles. It’s a soul-stirring window into Franklin’s vocal ability as she caresses and stretches the notes of the songs to maximum effect.

A new film, “Respect,” starring Jennifer Hudson and now playing in theatres, broadens the scope, detailing Franklin’s life from her beginnings, singing in her father’s church, to the height of her fame.

We first meet Aretha as a ten-year-old (Sky Dakota Turner) phenom, blessed with a beautiful voice.

“You have a talent,” her Baptist minister father Clarence (Forest Whitaker) says, “they call genius.”

She’s ten, says a friend, but her voice is going on thirty. Her guiding light is mother Barbara (Audra McDonald), who tells her, “Singing is sacred and you shouldn’t do it because somebody wants you to. What’s important is that you are treated with dignity and respect.”

Despite that advice, her father controls every aspect of her life. Using his connections, Rev. Franklin secures a recording contact with music producer John Hammond (Tate Donovan) at Columbia Records. Four low-selling albums of jazz and blues standards follow as she struggles to find her voice on vinyl.

The climb to the top of the charts came with advice from a legend, Dinah Washington (Mary J. Blige), who told her, “Honey, find the songs that move you. Until you do that, you ain’t going nowhere,” and a new manager (and love interest) in the form of Ted White (Marlon Wayans).

Taking the career reigns from Franklin’s father, White breaks ranks with Columbia, and gets a new record deal and a new sound with producer Jerry Wexler (Marc Maron).

As Franklin becomes known as the Queen of Soul, she and White struggle with personal demons that threaten to sidetrack her rise to superstardom.

First and foremost, “Respect” is a tribute to the genius of Aretha Franklin and the talent of Jennifer Hudson. Franklin left an indelible mark on several generation and styles of music, and her life’s work is well represented here, from her roots in the church, to her genre-bending chart toppers and the civil rights activism that defined her life off stage.

Hudson is given ample opportunity to showcase Franklin’s vocal stylings, and does so with a voice that sounds heaven sent. As a rousing jukebox musical “Respect” succeeds spectacularly well.

It’s in the telling of Franklin’s life that the movie hits a few sour notes. There is a lot of ground to cover, from alcoholism and racism to sexism and becoming pregnant at the age of 12, it’s a complicated story told in fits and starts, wedged between musical numbers.

The film’s early scenes, featuring the wonderful Skye Dakota Turner as the ten-year-old “Ree,” are nicely developed and paint a vivid picture of Franklin’s young life. It’s when “Respect” adopts the Wikipedia bullet point approach to quickly cover a lot of ground that the movie loses some of its dramatic thrust.

“Respect” skims the surface of a long, interesting life—the story ends rather abruptly in 1972 with the recording of Franklin’s landmark “Amazing Grace” gospel album—but presents a rousing tribute to Franklin’s lifeblood, the music.

THE COMEBACK TRAIL: 2 ½ STARS

Based on the 1982 film of the same name by Harry Hurwitz, “The Comeback Trail,” now on VOD, is star Robert de Niro’s third Hollywood satire after 1997’s “Wag the Dog” and 2008’s “What Just Happened.” It doesn’t pack the same kind of sardonic punch as those films, but supplies a laugh or two.

Set in 1974, De Niro plays Max Barber, a Hollywood hanger-on and producer of bottom-of-the-bill b-movies with names like “Killer Nuns.” He dreams of the big time, of making an epic but his reputation and lack of money put his dream out of reach until he concocts a deadly scam.

With his unsuspecting partner and nephew Walter (Zach Braff), Barber sets up a new film starring Duke Montana (Tommy Lee Jones), a suicidal western star living in a home for retired and forgotten, actors. The tough old coot spends his days playing Russian Roulette, but when Barber offers him a gig, Duke thinks this might his comeback and puts away the gun.

Barber, who is being pressured by gangster Reggie Fontaine (Morgan Freeman) to repay a sizable loan, has other ideas. His scam is to kill Duke, shut down the movie he never planned to finish, and, make a killing, literally, with the insurance money.

But, like so many things in Barber’s life, his scheme doesn’t go as planned.

“The Comeback Trail” is a movie in love with the movies. Barber and Fontaine banter in movie references—“I’m gonna choke you.” “Like Tony Curtis in the Boston Strangler?”—and, ultimately, it sings the praises of the power of the movies to inspire and transform lives.

Film fans may enjoy the sentiment, but they likely won’t be as impressed by the slack pacing and obvious telegraphing of joke after joke. It takes ages to get to the heart of the one-joke premise and, while there are mild laughs sprinkled throughout, as soon as director George Gallo (who wrote “Midnight Run”) allows the story to limp on to the film set-with-the-film, the movie starts to run out of steam.

Of the three Oscar winners who headline “The Comeback Trail,” only Jones appears invested in creating a memorable character. His take on the “broke-down-over-the-hill-has been” Montana has enough flashes of pathos to hint at what this movie could have been, a bittersweet comedy about the dreamers who live and breathe celluloid, but the movie’s silly tone lets him down.