Free Guy

This action-heavy comedy stars Ryan Reynolds as Guy, a happy-go-lucky background character in a computer game who discovers he's not real. The game's co-creator Milly (Jodie Comer) then enters the pixel metropolis with the startling revelation that Guy and his friends are at risk of deletion. It's up to her and Guy to defeat the egotistical corporate ogre who stole Milly's idea (Taika Waititi), with a big last-man-standing showdown. Director Shawn Levy's fun premise both celebrates and gently mocks geek culture but is let down by stop-start plotting and weak, predictable gags - not least lazy (and repetitive) jibes portraying gamers as virgins living in their parents' basements. The ever-likeable Reynolds is perfectly cast as the computer-code construct with a heart more human than the real-life players who invade his world, but it's hard to care about the other, more thinly sketched characters.