Getting Philly back to the cineplex with Ryan Reynold’s new tech-driven rom-com, “Free Guy”.
Whether you are an audience member with a Hulu or an HBO Max subscription or a critic like me, for the most part, you have spent your Covid-Delta-Pandemic time with studio cinematic blockbusters and intimate indie flicks on the smaller screen. From your laptop to your home viewing experience, you’re hooked up to a subscription-based streamer, and you have not walked into a movie theater or cinema multiplex for going on 16 months. Doubtless, you have heard how all of this in-home experience is hurting Hollywood’s bottom line, to say nothing of the physical cinema screening spaces – big and small – who show the films and serve the popcorn. I can’t and won’t tell you how and why you could feel safe in a movie theater, in a mask, hopefully safely distanced (can we get that second mandate going Mayor Kenney, please?).
What I can tell you is, if you are looking for a large scale, explosively cinematic and vividly imagined film that forces you to see it on the big screen it is this week’s opener only in theaters (as opposed to, say, Black Widow and The Suicide Squad offered on streamers and in cinema cineplexes), Free Guy.
From the mind of director Shawn Levy (A Night at the Museum, Stranger Things) and starring Ryan Reynolds (Deadpool), Jodi Comer (Killing Eve), Taika Watiti (Reservation Dogs) and Joe Keery (Stranger Things), Free Guy is a future-forward, action and tech-driven romantic comedy (at its heart – I’m not reviewing this here) that is equal doses Ready Player One, Tron, Inception and The Truman Show; yet all wholly original.
With all that, of course, Free Guy is a must to be viewed solely on the big screen when it opens this weekend, August 13.
“This is how I first saw Free Guy – last month after wrapping the film two years ago – on a big screen in Boston,” said Keery from a Philadelphia hotel near the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, in between interviews and getting lunch in Chinatown. “The big screen is the way a film like Free Guy should be viewed. And I had forgotten about the joys of seeing a movie as such, you know? I’m sure there are smaller movies where it doesn’t make a difference how you see them. Free Guy, though, is just better served by seeing it on a big screen in a communal setting – not just because of the action and the effects, but the comedy of Free Guy. It just plays better live and in a larger than life setting.”
So, go. Be Free.
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