Miles’s (Daniel Radcliffe) nerdy existence as a video game developer takes a dramatic turn when he inadvertently gets caught up as the next contestant with SKIZM, an underground gang live streaming real-life deathmatches. While Miles excels at running away from everything, that won’t help him outlast Nix (Samara Weaving), a killer at the top of her game.
To call “Guns Akimbo” insane, outrageous, demented, even mentally deranged, would be an understatement. The film, for me, evokes thematic elements from such movies as “Ready or Not” (which also starred Samara Weaving), “The Belko Experiment,” and even “Kingsman: The Secret Service,” films that were so outrageous and excessive with their violence, you had no choice but to laugh at the absurdity of it all.
“Guns Akimbo” is director Jason Lei Howden’s second feature-length film but he comes across as an accomplished filmmaker who has been making movies for years. While he has worked within the industry since 2008 as a visual effects animator on such titles as “The Avengers,” “Prometheus,” “The Hobbit” trilogy, and “Man of Steel,” he utilizes those skills perfectly for some of the film’s wacky and over-the-top action sequences involving shoot-outs and explosions. I got the feeling that Mr. Howden felt like a kid in a candy store with a sizeable budget, two A-list stars, and unlimited special effects at his fingertips. I know I would have.
Miles (Daniel Radcliffe) is a computer programmer stuck in a dead-end job who loves to troll internet trolls. When he comes across a website for an underground fight club called SKIZM, who live-stream real-life death matches between hardened criminals, he begins his nightly troll routine but soon comes to regret his actions when the next morning, several gangsters from SKIZM turn up at his door, knock him out, and when he wakes up, discovers two handguns have been bolted to his hands. He is quickly informed that he has 24 hours to kill the reigning champion, Nix (Samara Weaving), who wants out and is told that Miles is her last opponent.
When she researches Miles online and discovers that he is not a criminal and has never even been arrested, she laughs at the absurdity of how easy this is going to be and while Miles might very well be a computer nerd, when she tracks him down and opens fire on him in his apartment, he escapes and his survival instincts kick in and Nix soon discovers that he is more than she bargained for. With Miles quickly running out of time and options, he unearths a sad truth about Riktor (Ned Dennehy), the man who runs SKIZM and the death of Nix’s family and before she has a chance to kill him, he confides his revelation in her. Now she has a choice: either kill Miles and hope that Riktor will not renege on his offer of letting her go, or team up with Miles to take him down and end SKIZM, once and for all.
“Guns Akimbo” is pure, unadulterated fun and if you don’t mind people getting their heads blown off, body parts being strewn across the screen, and depraved humor, then you’ll have a blast. I like that Daniel Radcliffe, after the Harry Potter series finished in 2011, made a conscious decision to not play the hero in every film he could make thereafter; he played a demon in “Horns,” one of the villains in “Now You See Me 2,” and a farting corpse in “Swiss Army Man.” His roles have been quite diverse and I admire him even more as a result. Samara Weaving was the best part of 2019’s “Ready or Not,” where she portrayed a bride who must play a deadly game of survival in order to be accepted into her new husband’s family, and in “Guns Akimbo,” her role as major ass-kicker is amplified times 100 and both she and Mr. Radcliffe share undeniable onscreen chemistry, even though they spend much of the film trying to kill each other. It’s been a while since I was able to just kick back and have fun with a movie and “Guns Akimbo” is most certainly that!
Now available on Digital, Blu-ray™ (plus Digital) and DVD from Lionsgate
