Film Review: Guns Akimbo

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Guns Akimbo is a wildly entertaining 96-minute action-comedy film starring Daniel Radcliffe and Samara Weaving, overflowing with crass, unapologetically offensive dialogue and hilariously unflinching violence and gore.

Dir: Jason Lei Howden. Starring: Daniel Radcliffe, Samara Weaving, Ned Dennehy, Natasha Liu Bordizzo

The quickest way to summarise Guns Akimbo in its entirety is to imagine locking an edgy teenager in a room, mainlining 4chan into their brain, force-feeding them an unlimited supply of cocaine, and asking them to produce a film. Worse yet, to your surprise, the product of this horrifyingly excessive experiment turns out to be so bluntly funny and brilliantly satisfying that you can’t tear your eyes away.

Guns Akimbo opens on Miles (Daniel Radcliffe), a keyboard warrior with an undiscernable moral compass, who spends much of his time expositing his disgust with the state of the world and the people in it through social media feeds. Miles lives alone in every 21-year-old’s dream slum apartment, guzzling beer and accidentally liking photos posted by his ex-girlfriend, Nova (Natasha Liu Bordizzo).

One regretfully drunk evening, Miles comments on the feed of the illegal murder contest, SKISM, forgets to hide his IP address behind seven proxies, and wakes up to a blunt door-kick to the face. After pathetically attempting to apologise to the crudely tattooed SKISM leader, Riktor (Ned Dennehy), he’s drugged, operated on, and wakes to find pistols bolted into both his hands.

With 50 bullets in each gun, Miles is told he must kill his SKISM opponent Nix (Samara Weaving) to earn his freedom, who so happens to be an invincible, walking cocktail of narcotics and the most popular SKISM contestant. Unfortunately, Miles is absolutely useless at almost everything, and proceeds through an endless gauntlet of slapstick failures while evading the very persistent and highly accurate Nix.

Filmed in New Zealand, the supporting cast includes a wild collection of local talent, with homeless crack addict Glenjamin (Rhys Darby), douchebag manager Zander (Richard Knowles) and Miles’ software-developer friend Hadley (Milo Cawthorne) as notable standouts in the cast. It’s also brilliantly shot, using genre-fitting camera movement and trickery to disguise Auckland as a sprawling American city.

The writing and general tone of the film will be unarguably divisive. It would be just as easy to laud the writing as unrepentant, blunt, and brilliant as it would be to label it puerile, mind-numbing trash. However, the stoic consistency in presentation is what edges the film into the first category; even when the jokes or one-liners feel exhaustingly overdone, they fit perfectly within the universe of Guns Akimbo, and it’s been a while since a film has elicited such continual laughter from the majority of an audience.

It’s largely thanks to the phenomenal performances by Daniel Radcliffe and Samara Weaving that this works as well as it does. While polar opposites in character, the two have brilliant on-screen chemistry, with Nix’s ultra-crass ultra-violent nature highlighting the average-guy terror which pours from Miles in every moment. It also presents a great opportunity in the narrative to fulfil the need for someone to look cool while keeping our protagonist grounded in the reality of never quite succeeding.

At 96 minutes, the film felt longer than it is, perhaps due to its breakneck pace and overwhelming stimulus crammed into every frame and second of dialogue, and manages to barely avoid falling into a murky third act by propelling the story toward its blood-soaked conclusion.

 Guns Akimbo fits into a rare niche of film for me, sitting alongside Turbo Kid, Series 7: The Contenders, Gamer, and The Running Man – films which pushed the boundary of taste a touch further than you might feel comfortable with, but do so fearlessly and without compromise. It’s a brutal, crass, fantastically clever film which gleefully pretends to be moronic – a technological fever dream of violence, spit-in-your-face comedy, and social commentary that I can’t wait to succumb to again.

~Oxford Lamoureaux

 

Oxford Lamoureaux
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