Review: 'Free Guy' is a hilarious valentine to gaming culture, with Ryan Reynolds as an NPC who's more than the sum of his ones and zeros.

The action comedy “Free Guy” is perhaps the best video game movie ever made — not because it’s a faithful adaptation of a popular video game (it’s not), but because within its jokes and explosions, it carries a genuine fondness for gaming culture and the people inside and outside the console.

Ryan Reynolds stars as Guy, who has a perfect routine to his day. He wakes up, says hello to his goldfish, puts on a blue shirt and a striped tie, walks to the coffee shop and orders “one cream, two sugars,” meets his security guard friend Buddy (Lil Rel Howery), and works his job as a bank teller — where, inevitably, he gets robbed by gun-toting criminals in outlandish get-ups.

We in the audience recognize who, or rather what, Guy is long before he does. He’s a character in a video game. More importantly, he’s a nonplayable character, a computer-generated background figure who exists as something the game’s players and their avatars — “the sunglasses people,” Guy calls them — can shoot at. And in “Free City,” a hyper-violent first-person-shooter game, Guy gets shot at a lot.

One day, though, Guy notices something different in the routine. Or, rather, someone. He sees a young woman (“Killing Eve” star Jodie Comer), body armor peeking out from under a white blouse, who’s not like all the other avatars. Guy decides to follow this woman to the ends of the earth — which, in the contained world of the video game, is the shoreline.

While he pursues the woman, dubbed Molotov Girl, the woman is pursuing something else. Molotov Girl is searching the inner workings of the game for a video clip. Her player, Millie (also played by Comer), knows the clip will prove that “Free City” is illegally using software she developed with her former partner, Keys (“Stranger Things’” Joe Keery) — and that Antwan (Taika Waititi, chewing scenery with delight), the multi-millionaire owner of the company that publishes “Free City,” built his violent game on Millie and Keys’ open-world game concept.

Screenwriters Matt Lieberman and Zak Penn set the action in both worlds at once, with Millie-as-Molotov-Girl enlisting the lovestruck Guy to assist her in the video game world, while Millie tries to cajole Keys — who still works for Antwan’s company — to help her get the goods in the real world. The parallel construction works, in large part, because director Shawn Levy (who directed the “Night at the Museum” films) deftly sets up the distinction between grubby reality and the artificially clean, if often bullet-riddled, world within the video game. 

(Unlike the pixel-filled digital world of, say, “Space Jam: A New Legacy,” the video game platform here is, until the grand finale, largely free of the intellectual property of the studio’s parent company. In this case, that’s Disney — and there is a little bleed-through in the action-packed climax.)

Through the hilarity, “Free Guy” lands some sharp commentary about video game culture, such as the ease at which gamers never think about the cumulative effect of the violence they’re dishing out against digital bystanders. Levy also shows love for the gamer community by placing a raft of popular gaming YouTube stars in cameo roles (along with people the rest of us have heard of). The result is a fast-paced, wildly inventive action comedy that finds warmth and heart in the machine as it depicts the creative possibilities of both games and movies.

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‘Free Guy’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 13, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for strong fantasy violence throughout, language and crude/suggestive references. Running time: 115 minutes.