Guns Akimbo is the kind of film that sits comfortably in the realm of coked-up, comic book violence movies like Crank, Evelyn and Wanted. It's that bonkers sped up, unrelenting barrage of gunplay, blood and F-bombs style that we've come to recognise in these moderately budgeted R-rated movies.
It's comic book violence in a weird surreal version of our world, it's set in a reality that is just slightly twisted. Something we sometimes need to see to take us out of the depression, anxiety and general unease that we find ourselves in today. Guns Akimbo feels like a fuck you to the PC brigade and that is something I always welcome with open arms. The film follows Miles. Miles works for a game developer that makes a shitty nut collecting mobile game and he's constantly bullied by his superiors. He hates his job and in his down time he slobs out at home watching movies, drinking beer and indulging in his passion; Trolling. Now the world of Miles might look familiar as it comes across as a normal looking world but like most films like this, there is a darker underbelly to this world. In Crank it was gangs and hitmen and hookers and pimps, In Everly it was Yakuza and contract killers and in Wanted, it was a secret cabal of assassins working around the world. What these films have in common is a real world with a comic book aesthetic. Guns Akimbo follows this aesthetic. While Miles is at home, raging in the underground is a twisted game of cat and mouse, kill or be killed, Hard Target 2.0, killers pitted against each other and broadcast around America via drones, hidden cameras and the internet. Miles decides to troll the message boards of Skism (the name of the underground fight club) but he fucks up and trolls someone who knows his address. A group of people show up and knock old Miles out. He wakes up back in his bed in his apartment with guns bolted to each hand and a bullet count of 100, fifty in each gun. He's contacted by the head of Skism, a bald, heavily tattooed man called Riktor who instructs Miles to kill the current Skism champ, the unhinged escaped con by the name of Nix. Nix has been instructed to kill Miles and the two end up in a relentless cat and mouse game as Nix relentlessly pursues Miles, a non violent Vegan nerd.
Guns Akimbo is balls out mental. From the insane concept of having guns bolted to your hands to an underground, globally broadcast kill game, Guns Akimbo is obviously a film that doesn't take it's self too seriously and rightfully so. From it's hyper stylised, kinetic action sequences, it's cast of ugly drugged up characters and Rhys Darby as a clearly insane homeless guy, the film is definitely not for all tastes. If you watch a lot of arthouse films, you'll probably not enjoy this, thats not to say there's nothing wrong with watching arthouse movies, this is just a film that doesn't have that audience in mind, this film is for the action, hyper violent, mad max crowd, of which, if I haven't made it abundantly clear on this website, I am very much a part of.
The cast are actually pretty damn in their roles with both Samara Weaving and especially Daniel Radcliffe being the obvious stand-outs. Radcliffe has had an odd career post Harry Potter, appearing in a wide variety of genre films from undercover racist flick Imperium (2016), Swiss Army Man (2016), Jungle (2017) and Alex Aja's Joe Hill adaptation Horns (2013), we can definitely see that Radcliffe has tried to distance himself from Harry Potter as to not be typecast. Here he plays our protagonist Miles and he does a good job, his American accent is pretty damn good and he's almost able to carry himself as an underdog action star. If these are the films we're going to be getting from Radcliffe then I'd happily support him in his Journey.
Samara Weaving continues to be the new queen of Genre cinema after brilliant turns in Mayhem (2017), The Babysitter (2017) and most recently the brilliantly fun Ready Or Not (2019) and will soon be seen in Bill & Ted Face The Music and Snake Eyes later this year....hopefully.
Director Jason Lei Howden follows up his low-budget horror comedy Deathgasm (2015) with a completely different film with a much bigger budget and he pulls off 98% of the film, the remaining 2% is just some pretty terrible CGI and green screen but he pulls the rest of with a director confident behind the camera and for a second film its definitely an ambitious film to pull off. Now I'm not going to talk about the controversy surrounding some comments the director made because I've only just found out and feel like it would diminish the film.
Guns Akimbo is a bonkers mash up of Hard Target, Wanted, Crank and the coked-up nightmares of Don Simpson all rolled into one adrenaline fuelled good time at the movies. Sure it's never going to win any major awards but these type of films aren't made for that, they're made for popcorn and beer and in that aspect, Guns Akimbo pulls it off miraculously. I loved it, I love Samara Weaving and i'll definitely be watching it again. It's a solid 4 from this guy.
No comments:
Post a Comment