![]() ![]() But he sells the daft concept efficiently enough, and his frowningly earnest grasp of his own utter insignificance in the scheme of things made me wonder what Reynolds would be like in a production of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, maybe opposite Henry Cavill. Perhaps Reynolds is the only possible casting here, as his boilerplate handsomeness is, with age, making him look more and more eerily generic. And Millie realises that she will have to enter the game as a player, befriend Guy and enlist his help in getting back their intellectual property – before, of course, falling in love with this clueless pixelated lunk. This astonishes the game’s evil corporate owner Antoine ( Taika Waititi), and also the designers Millie ( Jodie Comer) and Keys (Joe Keery) whose concept Antoine ripped off. Gradually, Guy realises that he is an NPC, or non-player character, in a video game: a quirk or flaw in the algorithm means that he has hyperevolved into an AI state of free will and agency, able to question what is going on. There, he hangs out with his best friend, Buddy – again: generic or given name? – played by Lil Rel Howery, but his bank is always being hit by heists, which he greets with the same imperturbable smileyness. He smiles incessantly, wears a bland, short-sleeved blue shirt and goes to work every day as a bank teller in a serenely marvellous-looking modern city, resembling Vancouver. Reynolds plays a normal, boring guy whose name is Guy (amusingly, it is never clear if this is his actual given name, as in Guy Crouchback, or the more generic “guy”). ![]() ![]() The result is not something that’s in any way challenging, but Reynolds is so puppyishly eager to please. It’s an undemanding and cheerfully silly riff on the themes of virtual reality and artificial intelligence, and what the heck we’re all doing in this big old universe of ours: as if someone took The Truman Show or Inception – or even The Lego Movie – and stripped out every serious satirical ambition, replacing it with M&M-coloured spectacle. The great big handsome-goofy face of Ryan Reynolds looms out of the screen in this fantasy comedy from screenwriter Matt Lieberman and director Shawn Levy (of the Night at the Museum franchise). ![]()
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