Movie Review : Guns Akimbo (2020)
The very idea of someone having guns bolted to their hands and being forced into a televised death match is the most ludicrously American thing I’ve ever heard. Cramming guns, spectacle, internet and manifest destiny into a 97 minutes film sounds like a morally bankrupt joke made by a greedy, cold-hearted movie studio. Guns Akimbo’s premise doesn’t do it any favor, really. But I promise you it is way more than a clumsy, tongue-in-cheek John Wick ripoff.
Wait… that’s not entirely true. It kind of is a John Wick ripoff, really. But it’s a clever and purposeful one.
In Guns Akimbo, a twenty-something programmer named Miles Harris (Daniel Radcliffe) is struggling to find meaning in his life after being dumped by his girlfriend (Natasha Liu Bordizzo), so he kills time by trolling people on internet. One night, he decides to wreak havoc in the comment section of an illegal internet show called Skizm, where people fight to death. Turns out it was a disastrous idea and the person he angered will force him to participate.
Let’s get one thing straight: Guns Akimbo is primarily about people trying to kill each other in various creative ways. But there’s more to it. What separates it from dumb shooters where sexy, leather-clad protagonists pirouette in bullet time and take themselves extremely fucking seriously is the following idea: Guns Akimbo understands that modern problems are almost all interrelated. Someone just decided to make a bubblegum, run-and-gun movie about it.
So, Miles angered someone he didn’t know on the internet, right? That person happened to be a psychopath named Riktor (Ned Dennehy), the owner of Skizm. There are already two modern problems here: the loss of meaning and the engineering of conflict. Miles had no fucking business pissing people off. He did that to stave off a much needed existential crisis. He happened to piss off the wrong guy, leading up to our third problem: suffering as entertainment.
This is where Guns Akimbo goes from fun and clever, to brilliant. Throughout the entire movie, there’s a crowd following Miles’ fight for survival in real life and they are completely denying his humanity. Everyone watching is convinced he’s a scumbag who willingly signed up for this and treat him like a reality show contestant. These people feed Skizm with their viewership, which empower people like Rektor to provide them a distraction from the aforementioned meaninglessness.
Otherwise known as the vicious circle of modern living.
That said, if Guns Akimbo’s screenwriter and director Jason Lei Howden didn’t have the perfect tone, it could’ve become awry quick. What makes it different from, let’s say a dud like The Last Days of American Crime, is it 100% assumes being divorced from reality. The best way I can describe it is is like Scott Pilgrim Vs The World meets John Wick. It comments on modern living from an outside perspective. It’s not trying to be one of the cool kids.
I shouldn’t know better than to doubt Guns Akimbo. Daniel Radcliffe just doesn’t do stupid movies and his involvement alone should’ve tipped me off. He’s never been scared to go indie. Now, it is deep? It kind of is and it’s also quite entertaining. I laughed out loud at the sheer boldness of more than one scene. I would’ve never guessed it before pressing play, but that movie’s in the eights. I don’t see any reason why anyone would not be entertained by Guns Akimbo.
