Could you live your life as the background character in someone else’s life?

If you’re Guy (Ryan Reynolds, Deadpool), you can. If only for a little while. Free Guy, released to theaters Friday, is a hilarious, candy-colored delight. Reynolds plays a bank teller, one that gets robbed a lot, in what we quickly learn is a video game mission for the game Free City.

Free City, is an online role-player game, similar to Grand Theft Auto, and Guy is an NPC— a non-playable character. He has no agency, doesn’t go on missions, and has no personality beyond liking his goldfish, coffee (cream and two sugars) and his best friend, Buddy (Lil Rey Howery, Get Out).

In Guy’s world, there are sunglass people and regular people. The sunglass people are playing the game, and everyone else lives in the background, doing the same thing day in, day out. Guy doesn’t notice anything different, until one sunglass person called “MolotovGirl” (Jodie Comer, Killing Eve) catches Guy’s eye.

To Guy, Molotov is everything he never knew he wanted. He tries to find out more about her, but she’s busy on her own mission. The film pulls back from the game to look at the real world. ‘MolotovGirl’ is Millie Rusk, a game developer suing the Free City creator for stealing the code from her game and using it in his.

Millie’s partner in developing the game, Walter “Keys” McKey (Joe Keery, Stranger Things) who sold out to Free City’s publisher, Soonami, in exchange for becoming its lead developer. Keys starts to regret this decision, as Soonami’s boss, Antwan (Taika Waititi, Thor: Ragnarok, and so many more projects), has since turned Free City into a generic cash-grab franchise, and now plans to replace it with its sequel Free City 2. Also, he’s a real jerk.

Millie and Keys are on the outs, but eventually team up to find where in the game Antwan has hidden the code. And they both come to realize that they need help.

Guy is inspired to make his life different, and starts making changes in his routine. After he steals a pair of sunglasses from a real-life player, he sees everything he’s been missing. With the glasses on, he sees what players see: missions, health recharges, weapons stashes, in-game cash rewards and more.

He wants to help MolotovGirl with her mission, but first he must level up, and to do that, he has to work for it. He becomes a good guy in the game, learning to fight the bad guys and relieve them of their weapons before they can do any harm. Before long, he’s up to level 100 and ready to work with MolotovGirl.

By doing this, he gains worldwide notoriety in the game. Free Guy shows us cameos from lots of those YouTube game players talking about the rising popularity of “Blue Shirt Guy” as the character is known, and even a Jeopardy clip featuring the late Alex Trebek, which shows you how long ago this movie was supposed to be released. Trebek would still be alive if the movie had come out as scheduled in July of 2020.

Guy’s celebrity at first delights Antwan, then he realizes it will tank the release of his game sequel. That’s when the battle begins, pitting Antwan and the coders still loyal to him against Millie, Keys and Guy.

This movie is straight-up delightful, thanks in part to the witty script by Matt Lieberman and Zak Penn and the deft direction of Shawn Levy (Shadow and Bone, Stranger Things) who avoids all the bombast of video game movies like Ready Player One to focus on the characters and the story. The considerable charms of Ryan Reynolds are also a big reason the film is so likable; he plays his character as witty as Deadpool but with an earnest attitude without a hint of irony.

Reynolds’ supporting cast is equally good, even if Waititi does play Antwan way, way over the top evil at times. The film’s theme is rather obvious – be the hero of your own story – but that message is delivered in a fun, not preachy way. Fans of comic book movies are treated to some awesome cameos, which we won’t spoil. Though the movie is obviously made with videogame fanatics in mind, non-players will have no problem enjoying it too.

Free Guy is only available in theaters, and that’s a good thing. The beautiful art direction was made for a big screen and the movie is the kind of laugh-out-loud fun that deserves to be seen by a crowd of appreciative viewers.