Rudi and I caught Free Guy at the movies tonight. If you haven’t seen the bazillion commercials, it’s about a sweet, generic video game character named Guy (played by Ryan Reynolds) who essentially lives the same day over and over again until one day when he crosses paths with the woman of his dreams. Guy is an NPC or non-player character (essentially a one-dimensional character who’s part of the background to the story), but after interacting with her, he changes. He starts doing good deeds in order to gain levels (she says she won’t talk to him until he levels up) and in the process draws a cult following for disrupting the normal gameplay and for playing by different rules. But because he doesn’t realize that he’s living in a shoot-em-up video game called Free City, he also doesn’t realize that the girl of his dreams is a woman in the real world (played by Jodie Comer), who, it turns out, is actually half of a pair of programmers who had created a video game, the code of which may have been included in Free City. She’s hunting for clues to help her in a lawsuit against the guy who stole the code.

A little bit Wreck-It Ralph, a little bit The Lego Movie, and a little bit The Truman Show, Free Guy is about daring to live your authentic life and breaking free of the parameters that have been placed on you. It was surprisingly sweet and I highly recommend it.