Movie Review: Guns Akimbo (2019)

February 23, 2020

Written by DanXIII

Daniel XIII; the result of an arcane ritual involving a King Diamond album, a box of Count Chocula, and a copy of Swank magazine, is a screenwriter, director, producer, actor, artist, and reviewer of fright flicks…Who hates ya baby?

Miles (Daniel Radcliffe), is a real nerds nerd… a trolling mother fucker of a game designer, who loves nothing more than pissing off the fanatics of “Skizm”, a deathmatch club streamed live online.

As one would guess, Miles luck in the ball bustin’ game only lasts so long, and  he pisses off the wrong motherfucker and winds up with guns surgically added to his hands in a manner most crude, which makes him a perfect candidate to participate in Skizm whether he wants to or not.

Sounds like a total shit show… but it’s going to get a ‘titch worse as our hero soon finds himself in a life and death struggle with Skizm’s best, the violence crazed maniac Nix (Samara Weaving). Akinbo ensues… and carnage. Mostly the latter.

the first thing you may notice about Guns akimbo is that the film’s writer/director Jason Lei Howden (Deathgasm) has infused the comic book style proceedings with enough panache and flair to make your eyeballs melt into puddles of goo, and your brain to fire off wildly like one of Miles’ hand cannons.

This is absolutely needed as the material is so bizarre, over-the-top, and manic that it would be near-impossible to get in groove with the tale if the aesthetics weren’t a pitch-perfect match for the storytelling. This is a gloriously silly affair, and all involved are well aware of the insanity they are releasing, and that is this film’s greatest strength.

Adding to the poitive vibes I’m puttin’ down, Daniel Radcliffe is a likable dude in this, and although he is surrounded by unbelivable circumstances, he manages to garner a ton of audience sympathy due to his  mild-mannered persona… even if his virtual mouth and bravado gets him into deep shit.

Also, Weaving is absolutely superb as the cocaine snorting killing machine Nix who leaves piles of corpses in her wake… though there is a tad more to her than initially meets the eye, and her chemistry with Radcliffe is solid.

In the negative column, Guns Akimbo does suffer a bit in the action department. Sure, there is as much combat and ass-kickin’ as one would want in a picture like this, but that ol’ curse; janky editing (the bane of a good number of today’s action films) lessens some of the impact and makes the sequences hard to follow in spots.

To sum it up, if you dig on FPS games, or flicks like Hardcore Harry or Crank, then Guns Akimbo will satisfy like few others; it’s violent as balls, quirky, and filled with insane characters that are hard to resist!

 

 

 

 

 

Share This Article

You May Also Like…