Guns Akimbo - Movie Review

Guns Akimbo is bonkers. That’s pretty much all you need to know.

That’s not enough?

Okay, it’s a wild ride through an impossible future. It’s the Purge on acid but devoid of any heavy-handed political message.

This is a movie to be enjoyed on the substance of your choice. It is a swirling mix of violence, explosions, and neon. Those looking for plot structure, masterful storytelling, and/or character development should look elsewhere. It is essentially a video-game movie. It’s not based on any one game, but on the escape from reality that they provide.

Daniel Radcliffe plays Miles, a game developer employed in a digital sweatshop. He lives a depressingly real life of a millennial. If he’s not Facebook stalking his ex-girlfriend, then he is trolling. His face is either buried in his cellphone, laptop, or television. He is always online, always alone. One night he gets drunk and logs into Skizm, the central mechanism of the film. Skizm is an online streaming gladiatorial show. Battles are waged by criminals in the city streets. Battles are to the death. The public eats it up. Though highly illegal, people are watching the stream in bars, restaurants, and saunas. Apparently, everyone loves a good battle to the death, everyone but Miles. Miles decides to troll the Skizm live chat, eventually trolling the moderator. He feels invincible behind his keyboard anonymity, until the moderator reveals that they’ve tracked him through his IP address. Bing, Bang, Boom-they find him and drill a gun to each of his hands. Pulled into the game he is put up against the undefeated Skizm champ Nix, played by the always awesome Samara Weaving. Hilarity ensues… well that, and ultra-violence.

This movie is an odd mixture that feels like the writer/director Jason Lei Howden was undecided on what type of movie he wanted to make. One moment the movie is non-stop action, but then almost at random, it comes to screeching halt to try and add development to Nix’s character. The attempts to do this are too shallow and fail to lend anything to the movie other than to kill the pacing. If left as a non-stop set-piece, the movie could have been a masterpiece.

I wonder if producers or the studio had any effect on these moments, because the entire subplot of Nix’s family feels tacked onto the film. I feel someone got into the director’s ear and said: “Hey, we can’t have an amoral, heartless, crystal meth fueled terminator without a backstory on why she’s an amoral, heartless crystal meth fueled terminator.” Truth is, you could have. Something that sucks about movies nowadays is that they tell too much. We don’t need to know why a character is broken. You can imply tragedy without spelling it out. It is okay to leave a little mystery.

The only other major issue is the finale. For a movie that has so many amazing set pieces, the finale is lame. I get that it was meant to be like Die Hard but Die Hard may be one of the best written action movies of all time. It had gravitas and Allen Rickman. This movie has a coked-up Harry Potter. Its just not the same. This movie needed a huge ending. It didn’t need an attempt a moral message. It also didn’t need a lead into a sequel that isn’t going to happen. Let me rephrase that, with Kickstarter, nothing is impossible. A sequel shouldn’t happen.

I enjoyed the movie, but like I said, dose appropriately.