Still, I was surprised by how annoyed I got with the movie by the end. If I had been in the cinema alone there's a chance I might have walked out before it was over. Now a big part of that is that I'm familiar with programming and I've worked in games development, so whenever they tried to get technical (or would that be "pseudo-technical"?), the sheer stupidity of what they were saying completely broke my immersion. Unfortunately that happened quite a lot. I honestly believe the why and hows could have been handled a whole lot better - not that I think they were actually needed at all - and the whole thing could have been made a whole lot more believable. Or at least easier to suspend disbelief for.
But it wasn't just the technical aspects that felt badly written to me, pretty much the whole plot doesn't hold up in my mind. Basically, characters are just constantly doing things for really bad or practically non-existent reasons. Sometimes characters or themes felt contradictory to me. The whole script just didn't feel well thought-out.
I appreciate the fact that this movie isn't a sequel or, to my knowledge at least, based on a book or comic or something. But that doesn't exactly mean that it's original; the core concept has been explored in movies before, never-mind books and comics. I was personally reminded of Wreck-it-Ralph and The Lego Movie; the three all have similarities and differences, but they are all centered around the concept of a "real" world and a "fictional" one. Where Free Guy really lost me was in it's nonsensical attempts to justify the fictional world. In contrast Wreck-It-Ralph for example explained the rules of how its digital world worked and faithfully operated within those rules, but never tried to give an explanation for the existence of that world in the first place - and it didn't suffer in the slightest for it.
Another thing that just rubbed me the wrong way is that the movie seems on the surface to be targeted at gamers, yet upon watching I was struck by how little it seems to think of them. The movie is about a fictional game called "Free City", which seems to me to be mostly inspired by Grand Theft Auto. The protagonists of the film don't seem to play the game for fun, but simply because they have to, and other than them we we only really see three people playing it: two young girls (I think it's supposed to be funny that these young girls are playing such a violent "morally bankrupt" game), and one ugly overweight dude who's framed as being weird and unpleasant; he lives with his mother and yells at her not to touch his "special sock".
So the only real gamers we see are not normal well-adjusted respectable adults. And the only two games we see are Free City - basically a crime simulator, as the only missions we see people doing are robbing and hurting normal civilans - and the "good" game where you don't actually play the game, you just watch the game's AI or something. Which arguably doesn't really fit the normal definition of a "game". I definitely got the sense that the writers don't actually play games or even know that much about them; is their knowledge about gaming entirely from those old fear-mongering news reports? The film seemed to be condemning games as violent and lacking in morals, but there's just so much more to gaming than this movie seems to be aware of. There's all sorts of games out there, and while many of them involve violence, very few of them ask you to rob a bank. Hell, the movie shows everyone making a big deal out of Guy helping innocent civilian NPCs like it's never been done before, apparently not realising that's exactly what most games are all about. This movie just does not think much of games or gamers.
I like Ryan Reynolds, and this movie felt like it was written for him: his character really does lean into the kind of comedic performance we've seen from Ryan in movies like The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard. Which was fine with me. Taika Waititi was also fun, although I felt he was just too shallow a villain and would have worked much better if he was given a little more depth; he is portrayed as literally being incapable of comprehending the very idea of the existence of anything important other than money - that's genuinely not an exaggeration. If Keys was supposed to be boring and not particularly characterful, then Joe Keery did an adequate job - I'm not really being snide here, I genuinely don't think Keys was supposed to be interesting. Or at least it didn't occur to the writers to try to make him interesting - but then when does Hollywood ever try to make "computer nerds" interesting? Lil Rel Howery didn't quite land for me as Buddy; at least not later when he was acting less like a person and more like a chihuahua. Jodie Comer just felt completely miscast as Millie, at least in the in-game scenes. She looked awkward in the action scenes, a lot of the romantic scenes with Guy just did not work at all for me (and it wasn't Ryan who wasn't working), and overall she just didn't feel like the character that the movie initially tried to portray her as. In face I felt she was kind of awful as Molotov. I actually wonder if that's deliberate, like the whole character is supposed to be very fake? It would make sense and is supported by the whole fake accent thing, but the movie is so badly written as a whole that I have a hard time believing it. Well, even if it was deliberate, I still hated it. She was not as bad in the real-world scenes, but the poor writing didn't exactly allow her to shine there either.
It's really hard for me to be objective about this film. I didn't enjoy it, but overall the action was good (when it wasn't centered around Jodie Comer, which luckily most of it wasn't) and the comedy worked for me (though it relied on a certain degree of familiarity with computer games so it might not have that broad an appeal), so... you know, it's certainly a movie that you could enjoy if you have a high tolerance for very stupid writing. I'm going to compromise by giving it a 6/10: what I would consider not particularly bad but not particularly good. But subjectively I think it's bad. Very bad.
I would like to elaborate slightly on why I think this movie doesn't respect games or gamers. I mentioned that it never shows people (or at least adults) who actually play games for fun in a good light, pretty much always showing them as annoying weirdos. But more than that, it has these apparently famous streamers (I mean, I've heard of them but I've never watched them) talking about what a revolutionary idea it is to not run around gunning down innocent civilians in games. Like, they've never even thought of that before. Seriously, when Guy acts as a hero, the whole world acts like this is something that has never been done before! Which is amazingly stupid and ignorant: games are ALL ABOUT heroes. Probably 99% of games have you playing as a hero (at least on paper). And even the ones where you play as an anti-hero often focus more on presenting you with an even greater evil to fight (like some of the Saints Row games), so even if the game offers you the freedom to be "bad" your main goal is still not just being bad, but actually fighting against someone worse. Games where you genuinely just play a crook certainly do exist, but they are a small minority.
What's more there are games that are far deeper and more thought provoking than this movie could even think to aspire to be; games that explore the concept of morality in a way that movies can't. Games that force you to make difficult decisions, or to watch the character you're controlling get morally corrupted and become a villain as a consequence of the very actions you were guiding them through. Games that let you play both sides of a conflict, showing how easy it is for either side of an argument to believe they are in the right.
And then of course there's games that aren't violent at all. According to Wikipedia as of writing the biggest selling game ever is Minecraft - a game about building stuff. OK, GTA is number 2, but number 3 is Tetris: a puzzle game about stacking bricks! The writers of this film know nothing about games, and yet have the audacity to try to preach that games are wrong and they... I dunno, shouldn't be about playing but only about watching? Or something? I mean, as far as I can tell that's what you're supposed to do with their "good game"!
By the way, the idea of a "game" that has AI that actually thinks and feels is incredibly disturbing to me, far more so than the idea of a game where the player commits "crimes" on unthinking unfeeling NPCs. But I guess that's another topic, one that's perilously close to trying to discuss the meaning of life, and I am not ready to get into that.
What's probably a bigger issue if I am to be honest is how poorly the characters are written. Let's start with a simple one: Keys. He used to be an indie game developer, and he had a crush on his partner Millie. Then when the game that he put so much time, effort and passion into is buried, Millie decides they've been wronged and quits in order to try to get their game back. But instead of following the woman he cares about to try to recover his creation, he... doesn't, even though apparently that means he's not supposed to talk to her anymore because of his NDA. What's worse, he's not even working on actual development - something that indie game developers enjoy, or else they wouldn't have become indie developers - despite the fact that his boss has repeatedly offered him the chance. Instead he just sits around fixing bugs and doing customer support - both things that are generally not considered to be very enjoyable. Why? Why didn't he quit with Millie, or at least take the development job? It doesn't make sense. He just waves off an offer of promotion with a nonsensical "I'm good where I am". That's insane and also stupid.
I also don't understand why Key told Antwan that Guy was an NPC. Why would he do that - surely he knows that Antwan wouldn't care about that! He already knows that Antwan isn't interested in the creative elements of game design and that Antwan does not like Guy (thinking he's a player) and wants him out of the game - he's already working on a replacement - and that Guy being an NPC is proof of Antwan breaking the law, so Antwan would need to hide that proof or lose out big-time (or so we're told). So just announcing it to Antwan was incredibly stupid. And why the hell didn't he take backups of Guy, and the whole game in fact? He's a software developer: we back up our work regularly! I mean, we pretty much all learn to after the first couple of times we lose a big chunk of work... but in this case you don't need to be a software developer to think "Oh damn, I need to make a backup of this!".
Antwan doesn't make much sense either. Yes, he's a very shallow cartoon villain, but even then not much of what he does makes very much sense. He buys this little indie game, and then doesn't publish it. Why did he buy it? For the advanced learning AI? He doesn't WANT advanced learning AI! The moment he finds out that the game's A.I. is behaving in a novel way, he immediately has it reset! Perhaps the movie wanted to imply that the game was very popular because of it's advanced AI, but we never see that - the NPCs never act in an intelligent way when interacting with the players. In fact Millie actually makes fun of the game for how the NPCs always repeat the exact same lines, suggesting that the AI behaviour is very rigid and mechanical. There's just never any indication that any part of Keys and Millie's original game was somehow important to Free City.
At one point, when Keys suggests making an original game, Antwan shuts that idea down because he thinks people only want sequels - this is one of the things that's supposed to mark him as a jerk because only making sequels instead of original creations is something that a lot of people (myself included) look down on; it's "money-grubbing executive behaviour". But then later when it turns out he's not using any of the original code and is creating the sequel from scratch, that's also shown as "evil" behaviour! Developing any game, even a sequel, from scratch is far more expensive than simply tweaking your existing codebase slightly, and is really only worth doing if the existing code is unusable moving forwards for technical reasons (which is obviously not the case here), or you have a very ambitious game in mind that requires completely different architecture in your gaming engine. Which is a good thing, and is the exact opposite of the "lazy sequel" idea that the movie condemned him for earlier! So why is he doing it if he only cares about money and think that players aren't really interested in new stuff, and why is the movie condemning him for it? He's just such a poorly written villain, nothing but a shallow collection of barely-related clichés.
When the movie starts we see Guy walking around, feeling super-casual about all the death and destruction that surrounds him. His bank gets robbed at gunpoint every day and it's just routine for him, he has casual conversations with other NPCs as they are getting beaten up and robbed, there's literally wars being fought all around him as he goes about his day and it's completely normal for him. He even gets killed by a train and wakes up the next morning like nothing has happened - and we know he remembers it because he refers to it later as the "train of death" or something. This all happens right from the start of the movie. We are shown time and time again that death just doesn't really exist in his world. So why is it that he goes into denial when he shoots the player robbing the bank the first time? And why is he so scared when the cops start shooting at him, when he died just the other day and treated it like nothing? And again when his memory is erased and Molotov takes him hostage he's acting terrified; it doesn't make sense when his bank gets robbed at gunpoint every damned day that he would be so terrified when a gun is pointed at him. It's hugely inconsistent.
By the way, Guy changed his whole life for Millie, utterly devoting himself to leveling up just so he could spend time with her. But at the end when he breaks up with her it just seems so easy, so casual. Yes, he grew and changed as a character, but for a romance that was built up so much up to just a few minutes earlier, with the movie hitting all the romantic clichés (love brought back Guy's memory, Millie did the impossible for love, etc), it just ended too easily. No-one seemed particularly sad about having to give up on what was just a few moments ago portrayed as a very powerful and intense romance.
And now we have to talk about Millie. In the real world, Millie was kind of obnoxious. She broke into Keys' home to speak to him. Apart from being illegal, that's just NOT right: it's not OK to break into people's homes. There's other ways to speak to people. She could have waited outside at the very least. What's more, she's not there to catch up with an old friend; she's just there berate him, to push him to give up on his career and pretty much break the law to help her get what she wants. She really doesn't seem to respect or care about him, only about what she can get him to do for her.
But she's far worse in the game. The movie initially sets her up as this tough femme-fatale, probably because they thought that the scenes of her acting that way would be fun and cool? Which is fine, except that she's not really very capable or influential for the rest of the movie - she keeps failing early on and then kind of just sits and watches other people do most of the work in the later parts of the movie. So showing her acting super-tough doesn't really establish her character because that's not who she really is. OK, she's agressive and driven, but still: she's not the one solving most of the problems, Guy is. She's not exactly a damsel in distress, but... she's the one who needs something and all the men have to work hard and make sacrifices to help her. For much of the movie anyway.
To be fair, by the end they are ostensibly trying to save Guy and the rest of the AI from deletion. But surely if that was their goal they could just back up their code - Keys even had Guy's code on screen at one point. I mean, just back up the whole game. No, they spend the whole movie trying to achieve what Millie wanted from the start: finding proof that Free City was built on her game. So... yeah, she kind of does fill the narrative role of "the girl who needs help" and Guy and Keys are "the men who help her".
But that's not really the issue with her "femme fatale" intro. The issue is that she acts like a real jerk. She's buying info from a broker, but she's really rude and hostile towards him, going as far as downright violence. She says she kills people who ask questions. Then she kills him because he asked her about her accent (which was fake btw). Killing people for talking is what villains do! In fact it's a cinematic shorthand to let the audience know that someone IS a villain! She's supposed to be one of the heroes of the movie, but her introduction is telling us that she's a villain! That's incredibly bad writing! Seriously, this is writing 101 stuff: introduce your main characters in a way that tells us who they are! OK, that's an oversimplification, but still: unless the whole point is to fake the audience out (which it wasn't here), introducing a hero in a way that tells the audience that they're a villain is just very bad writing!
Of course she's not actually killing anyone: it's all a game, they'll just respawn. So why does she kill other players? The only possible explanation is that she enjoys it (which is at odds with the "moral" of the movie btw). To me it felt like a jerk move. In fact she acts like a jerk a lot while in Free City, and occasionally when in the real world too (such as the afore-mentioned breaking-into-Keys'-home thing). I suppose there's an argument to be made that Millie is deliberately written as a jerk at the start, and that later in the movie she becomes a more likeable character, as part of a character growth arc. It really didn't feel that way to me though; it felt initially like the movie was trying to portray her as a "hot badass chick", and the only reason she stopped being an obvious jerk to people later was because she was too busy. After all, she doesn't really do anything nice for anyone else, well, ever, and her goal in the movie never changes in a way that might indicate that she's grown and changed: she basically starts off trying to prove that Antwan stole her game, and... then she manages to get her game back. Yes she gets more than that, but it's in addition to what she wanted from the start. I just don't see any indication that she actually changed.
Going back to killing the information broker, doing so despite that fact that it's a game and he'll just respawn didn't just set her up as an unpleasant person, it also establishes her as an idiot. Because what if she ends up needing more information, and he refuses to help her because now he doesn't like her? Or worse, he might decide to screw with her as revenge, like warning the dude she wanted to steal the video from about her. There was just no reason for her to go around creating enemies!
Speaking of, why the hell was she trying to break in and steal that videoclip anyway? Did she maybe consider just asking him for it? He's really got no reason to say no, especially if she asks him nicely. I mean, worst comes to worst she could just offer him some money or something! And that's completely ignoring the fact that the dude apparently was a streamer or something, meaning the video clip was probably already up online somewhere. I mean, the guy said that it was a weird bug and he even went back and tried to replicate it later; that's the kind of video clip that people tend to share online these days. Because that's what gamers do these days: upload clips of interesting things that happen to them, not lock the clips up in some sort of digital vault to stop anyone from seeing them! Which the writers should know if they, you know, had any idea at all about gaming.
But instead of doing anything the slightest bit intelligent (like maybe using the portal gun as soon as she got the clip or hiring some NPCs to help her fight his NPC bodyguards or something), she spends ages doing things in the stupidest way possible, because otherwise the plot wouldn't have happened. You know what I call that? Bad writing. Because now I'm not invested in the plot, and I don't like the character. I mean, overall I just found her to be unlikeable. And when a movie's leads are unlikeable, well, that's a problem, because it means I'm not enjoying myself while watching them.
It didn't help that Millie didn't seem to like gamers. She treats the players of Free City with disdain, effectively referring to them as "sociopathic man-children", treating Guy himself with an incredible degree of disdain and condescention when she initially thinks he's just a player. She doesn't seem to think much of Free City itself; she didn't show any enjoyment of the game (other than killing other players), and seemed dismissive of it when telling Guy how to level up (so I'm not sure how she got to be such a high level or how she collected so much stuff in-game; she had to have played a lot of missions to aquire experience and items, which is just not consistent with the character or the messsage of the movie). We see her belittling it for the NPCs' repeated voice lines, for example. She never talks about any games except her own AI sim thing (but then the whole movie doesn't really); I just never got the impression that she was a gamer or cared about games. She never talks about any other games for example. Which is why it feels weird to me that she was a game developer. Most game developers I've met - at least the younger ones - like games. That's why they got into the business.
She does end up liking Guy though. You know, eventually. In fact she falls in love with him. Which is fine. What's not fine is what happens after they break up at the end. So it turns out that Keys was into her the whole time and she didn't know. And as soon as someone explains it to her, she runs right into his waiting arms (metaphorically speaking). This happens probably less than five minutes - in movie time - after the break-up with Guy. That's got to be the fastest rebound ever right? Like, that can't be healthy right? Even if Guy's character was partly influenced by Keys (which isn't really what the movie claimed but which we can assume is probably the case), they are still different people with different personalities. Besides, Millie has been working alongside Keys for years prior to this. Just the two of them, collaborating on their shared passion project. And the whole time she didn't notice he was interested in her? Fine, maybe he's really good at hiding it. But surely in this time she has at least considered him as a potential romantic interest? She must have; that's kind of how humans work. And clearly she rejected the idea, as if she had ever decided to persue it I'm sure Keys wasn't going to turn her down. So basically, for years she's been sitting beside him and not had any romantic inclinations towards him; that means he's not interesting to her. But the moment she finds out he likes her she's instantly into him? No hesitation? That's just.. ugh, it's just lazy writing!
Sigh. So she's a protagonist who's introduced like an antagonist, killing for no reason. A game developer who doesn't like games. She co-wrote the most advanced AI in history and yet is clearly an idiot. And she was so deeply in love with Guy that she somehow overwrote software with her mind so she could kiss him, but drops him and moves on in under five minutes without shedding a tear. It's almost impressive how badly written she is. Well, all the characters in this movie are badly written to some degree or other, as was the plot. It's like the writers just did not care about the fundamentals of storytelling!
I hated the "famous streamers" bits. I think it's because the whole idea of a streamer is someone who says whatever they are thinking without a script or as much in the way of filters. So when you take a bunch of streamers and have them reading from a script someone else wrote for them, it completely undermines the whole concept. And yeah, I get that it's a movie about gaming and streamers are a part of gaming culture, so it was always going to be that way, but somehow seeing them vocalize the stupid preachy "message" of the movie like it was some mind-blowing new idea just pushed it too far for me.
What the hell was up with those scenes that suddenly popped up at the end where the whole world was watching what was happening in the game? I mean that's a common cliche in movies, but it really didn't work here. In The Truman Show it's very well set up right from the start that the show is popular all around the world. But here we're only told that Free City is a popular game; as in, popular to play. There's no mention of it being broadcast on live television. Those were not twitch streams we were shown, that was just plain old television. We're never told that the game has an e-sport scene or anything. But late in the movie we just suddenly see old Chinese dudes in a tiny noodle joint watching this multiplayer crime simulator game on the only TV like it's a news broadcast or something. It's just so weird and out-of-place.
There's a scene where Guy and Buddy talk about whether something matters if it's not real, or something. And then that's it, no-one cares about the fact that they're just a computer simulation anymore. To me it felt far too easy, that they had this brief, rather shallow discussion and just casually overcome the existential horror of not being real. I just think that, like so many other things in this the movie, it would have been better to not bother including it at all, than to do it in such mediocre way. I dunno, that scene just annoyed me is all.
So the writers think that part of a building is one server and another part is on another server? That AI characters are only on the server that correlates to which part of the building they're on, and they move around between servers as they move between areas in the city? That if you wreck servers that parts of the game disappear, but the actual simulation keeps running? Oh, a somehow all the NPCs end up in the only part of the city that's on a server that WASN'T destroyed, despite having no way of knowing which server/part of the city was going to be destroyed next? And both that one building in the distance AND the bridge with Guy on it AND the "original game world" that Guy is looking for are all on the exact same server? I just... sigh. I just can't suspend my disbelief for this movie, it's just too stupid.
How did Keys NOT recognize his own code? That's a bit like an artist not recognizing their own paintings because someone changed the frame. I don't buy it. I mean, at one point he talks about how he programmed Guy (mentioning using Millie as inspiration when designing Guy's dream girl or something), and yet he somehow doesn't recognise that he's working with the AI system that he wrote from the ground up? That's INSANE.
Why are the old game assets even in the new game? It's not like someone forgot about them; we're told Antwan tried to hide them, even patching out bugs caused by their presence. Why do that instead of just deleting the damned assets? It's not hard! I'm pretty sure it's easier than hiding them and patching bugs!
And since I'm discussing technical-ish stuff, how did no-one know that Antwan was developing the new game from scratch? That's not something you can do in secret from your own damned company! I dunno, whatever.
So what was the deal with Millie's lawsuit against Antwan? She was suing him for using the code he bought from them? I mean, he bought it, it's his. The case makes no sense. It also makes no sense that the original world is still inside the game. That's dumb, there's no reason for that. It's even brought up that Antwan realised the old game world was baked into the reflection maps and so he fixed that; why wouldn't he just delete all the old game world assets while he was at it? There's no technical reason not to, it wouldn't take that much work. He was after all VERY aware of the lawsuit Millie had against him. Besides, I just don't see any reason why he would build Free City on their game in the first place. As I said, there's no indication that any aspect of their original game was needed or desired for Free City.
Anyone who has played videogames in the last thirty years or so has almost certainly encountered an invisible wall before. Invisible walls in videogames are exactly that: walls that you can't see and can't move through. The "invisible wall" in Free Guy that they need to pass to get to the "original game" is invisible (until to get close to it), but IS NOT A WALL: when Guy tries to touch the "wall" he isn't stopped, but his hand passes right through! It was much more like one of those optic illusion walls that hides an entrance (like the one in the old Jem and the Holograms cartoon). I was fully expecting Guy to poke his head through and see something different on the other side! Just... the guys who made this movie are clearly not gamers!
By the way, they say that they need to do something about the wall to get to the old game, but we never see the wall go away. There's never any specific mention of it being deactivated or anything. Instead they walk up to the water and we see Keys make them a bridge from a building. There's no visual of the wall being there initially and then suddenly not being there; they act more like the water is the problem! But it's a game with planes and helicopters in it (we've seen them): why do something overly-complex like reconfiguring a building into a walkway (which btw would probably take weeks of development time) instead of just spawning them a flying vehicle? Hell, why doesn't Millie already have one: she has a room full of cars and stuff after all, and even if she didn't have one she could probably buy one from the in-game store in like thirty seconds or something!
Of course the whole ending was a mess. Guy and Millie need to get across to the other side of the city, but they're afraid Antwan will get all the NPCs to stop them. So they... somehow gather all the NPCs in the city - which would take at least as much time as it would have taken them to get to the beach, and in practice would definitely take much more - to give them a big speach and hope that everyone believes the whole "you're living in a videogame" thing, processes such soul-crushing news in just a few seconds, and agrees to help them. Then we see everyone in the city back where they were before, and after they've clearly been sitting there for a while (they are holding cups of hot coffee, so they've spent at least a few minutes brewing coffee or something), we see Guy and Millie driving past in a car!
Honestly, what the hell is that sequence of events? How did Guy and Millie summon everyone in the city? How long did they stand around waiting for them? And then did the two wait for them all to leave before they started driving? And what exactly was the point - how exactly was Antwan going to get everyone to try to stop Guy and Millie? There was never any indication that the NPCs could be told to do stuff directly (it's mentioned that players can hire NPCs as guards, but that's not the same as Antwan just telling everyone in the city to do something). Oh, and btw: Millie has a portal gun. I feel like that could have been useful to quickly move across the city?
Antwan develops Dude to replace Guy. Why would he develop an AI to "replace" what he thought was a player? It doesn't really make sense to me as a thing that someone would think of unless they already knew that Guy was an AI. But Antwan didn't know that.
Visually the movie was a little boring? It was clean and bright, but it was just a city. You know, one of the great things about games is that they can take you to amazing places, far off worlds. Ditto for movies. So the fact that it all just happened in what was actually quite a small-feeling city was a bit of a waste. They could have made it more interesting; there's no reason Free City couldn't have been a futuristic sci-fi city or something. Except that apparently the only game the writers know of is GTA and couldn't be bothered to try to hide it in the slightest.
Iirc Keys mentions that Guy's AI has far more lines of code than it should. The developer part of me was horrified by the idea of code in a real-time application that constantly and permanently increases in size as the product runs. That's TERRIBLE, especially for performance-oriented applications like gaming. Although having said that, the amount of unneccessary processing this game does, simulating hundereds of characters as if they were real people, but with them never actually doing anything different so the simulation makes no difference to players, is just terrible from a performance perspective.
Why does Antwan get angry that players aren't killing NPCs anymore? As far as I can tell they're still playing the game.
I hated the scene where Millie kissed Guy. Are you telling me that she somehow changed the code itself using the "the power of Love"? For real? Like, it just does not fit the entire rest of the movie! Plus she breaks up with him the next day and instantly moves on to another guy, so... I dunno, what kind of "love" was that?
When Guy and Buddy are running across the bridge and it's collapsing around them, Buddy gets cut off. So he calls to Guy, and Guy turns around - and Buddy immediately says "No! Keep going!". So why did he call out to Guy in the first place? And of course everything stops collapsing for about twenty minutes as they have a big emotional goodbye conversation. I mean, I get it from a writing perspective, but the way it played out in the movie just annoyed me because it was so stupid. Oh, and by the way, in that conversation Buddy is like "I've been scared my whole damned life, but I'm not scared anymore". Which is great, except that no, he wasn't scared, he wasn't the slightest bit scared when we saw him before, having casual conversations when while armed gunment robbed his bank. What a half-baked character.
Why was everyone behaving with such hostility when Guy asked for a different cup of coffee? A tank rolls up behind him and turns to point its cannon at him: why? It's not like there was some sort of conspiracy to keep the AI from realising the world wasn't real or anything like that. Just another scene that doesn't actually make sense.
