When Disney released Tim Burton’s Dumbo remake, its story of a large, money-grubbing circus gobbling up Dumbo because he was popular, only to then completely misuse him, seemed to more than a few to be a direct criticism of the tactics Disney itself employs. Well, with Free Guy, they offer yet another searing criticism of, um, themselves—this time through their gobbled-up Twentieth Century Studios property.
Free Guy is the story of an unimportant video game NPC (non-playable character), Guy (Ryan Reynolds), whose brilliant coders endowed him with the AI that allows him to learn and grow. But then Antoine (played way too over-the-top by Taika Waititi), the loser head of video game production company Soonami, purchases Guy’s game and shelves it. That is, he says he shelved it, but...