Premise: An internet troll wakes up with guns bolted to his hands as an unwilling player of an internet murder game.
It's really hard to remember the difference between "really bad" and "not for me". A movie can be both and it's easy to attribute something to one category when I mean the other. Guns Akimbo is a great example of this. I think it is a terrible movie and it's not a type of movie that I typically like either. It belongs to a subgenre I call "Festival Midnight Screening Action". At many film festivals, there's a midnight screening portion. Typically, these are less serious films, either horror or grindhouse/exploitation types of movies. Extreme stuff that rides the line between camp and gleeful disregard. They are movies less about plot and performance and more with experimenting with a fun idea. Guns Akimbo, for example, not doubt started with the idea of an internet assassin game or the idea of someone with gun hands. To think too hard about the plot logistics is to miss the point entirely. I don't turn plot logistics off in my brain very well (not in this genre at least) so I'm a poor audience for this movie.
That said, I don't even think it's very successful at the thing it is trying to be either. There are two paths this movie could take. 1) Guy gets stuck in the game and turns out to be really good at it. 2) Guy gets stuck in the game and gives commentary throughout about how insane it is. Guns Akimbo attempts to be both at different times and that really doesn't work. Daniel Radcliffe's Miles is somehow really good and popular at the game despite having no instincts for it and never really grasping the gravity of the situation. Mostly, he just survives because Samara Weaving's Nix is so bad at this too. For a champion assassin who can track him down anywhere with an amazing assortment of weapons, she sure can't hit him at close range. Again, a version of this that's like a Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, in which Miles is so incredibly lucky in his incompetence at the game that he gets people to believe he's actually a wolf in sheep's clothing would be fun. A version in which he gets good at the game after a couple hours via montage or credits his surprising badass skills to playing a lot of Duck Hunt as a kid would've been great too. Existing somewhere in the middle doesn't work. I also don't get the whole movie being him vs. Nix. It seems like he should have a few more opponents, like a Battle Royale that starts with 8 or 20 people and ends with Miles and Nix as the last 2 standing.
This is a really, really difficult movie to not mentally rewrite. I can see so many different movies this is trying to be (Upgrade, Hardcore Henry, Smokin Aces, Nerve, Mad Max, The Hunt...) that I can't help but think of the better ways to do different aspects of it. The dialogue is painful because it either needs to play up the cheesy dialogue to camp levels or have a self-aware character remark on how cheesy they all are. Honestly, I think this movie is badly in need of a "sane person in the room "character: A person who says things like, "that makes no sense" or "that seems dumb". It could be Miles or it could even be Nix rolling her eyes at how Riktor (Ned Dennehy) carries himself like a reject from The Warriors. Someone needs to call this movie out within the movie. Or, a direction that would work even if I wouldn't care for it is a Ready Player One angle. Have Miles be more aware of the game even if he's out of his element.
The movie needs 80% less backstory. Every other thing a person says sounds like it belongs in an older draft where that was more important to the plot. For example, I imagine the stuff about Nix and her father was way more important to an earlier draft or concept of the movie. As it evolved into something else, that should've been dropped for time. Instead, it's left in as a pointless complication and a dangling narrative thread that's never really resolved. This movie is overflowing with stuff like that, and it doesn't seem to realize that "a guy trying to survive a game that he's unwittingly a part of" is all the plot and backstory it needs. I even thought that this movie would benefit from Miles having amnesia, because then it turns into the movie being more about understanding the game and exploring this criminal underworld.
Daniel Radcliffe is the best thing about the movie, but I don't think he's nearly as good as he could've been. His American accent stilted a lot of his performance. That dude can be squirrelly and sweaty with the best of them, but it's really hard to maintain an accent while screaming and whimpering. So, instead, he talks without much range of emotion throughout and his measured narrative ends up doing a lot of the heavy lifting. A friend who I was watching this with called Samara Weaving a Manic Pixie Death Girl, which is really accurate and sums up my disappointment with the character. I never believed her as a human or an agent of chaos.
There are brief glimpses of a better movie. When Miles and Nix start working together, I appreciate the bickering buddy comedy vibe of that (and realized how much that was missing from the first hour). The movie is overflowing with good premises and half thoughts. "Gun hands" is a cool image. Commentary on increased surveillance or dehumanization of people via internet communities could've gone places. This is actually a really fun movie to talk about. It's really bad, but at least it's taking a lot of swings. I see many slightly better movies that are much less interesting to watch or think about. At least with Guns Akimbo, it wears its flaws like a badge of honor. I can respect that even if I really, really don't like it.
Verdict: Strongly Don't Recommend
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