After nationwide shutdowns, due to Covid-19, unfortunately, there was a limited release for this this action-packed fim shot in New Zealand.
Guns Akimbo opens on Miles (Daniel Radcliffe), in one of his most extreme attempts to wipe out his bookish ‘Harry Potter’ image. He is 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 also lives alone in every 21-year-old’s dream slum apartment, guzzling beer, palying online games and accidentally liking photos posted by his ex-girlfriend, Nova (Natasha Liu Bordizzo). Whoops!
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. Admittedly, the Nut Bust 2 game developer contributed to his plight, by goading the wrong people and 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 ((Read or Not’s Samara Weaving) to earn his freedom, who so happens to be an invincible, walking cocktail of narcotics and the most popular SKISM contestant. It sounds fun, right?
Now, he has just 24 hours to kill his opponent, and of course, she gets him first. The film is a cat and mouse game across the city (Auckland, New Zealand, standing in for Shrapnel City).
After the fitfully hilarious metal horrors of Deathgasm, Kiwi visual-effects-specialist-turned-writer writer-director Jason Lei Howden’s return to the big screen is another gleefully over-the-top take on a well-worn genre.
Filled with visceral violence, copious car-nage and pitch black humou ‘Guns Akimbo’feels liek Escape from New York mixed with The Running Man on steroids. Rated: R, for strong bloody violence throughout, pervasive language, drug use, sexual references and brief graphic nudity, Guns Akimbo is a devishly tasty treat to watch by yourself or with an entire bunch of like-minded souls. Then we have the eclectic soundtrack includes the fabulous use of Dead or Alive’s You Spin Me Round and Rick James’ Superfreak.
I KNOW THAT FACE?
For Kiwi cinemagoers, there’s the added delight of spotting the likes of Rhys Darby, as a homeless guru-of-kinds, and Josh Thompson, Grant Bowler and Thomas Sainsbury in minor roles.
FINAL THOUGHTS:
This very busy, totally-off the rails film is a dark comedy which offers surface commentary about the evils of the internet, but eventually Radcliffe and Weaving manage to add some welcome humanity to the story, and alongside a stunnng soundtrack, it is a fully-rounded film filled with carnage.
5/5 STARS