Guns Akimbo
"Akimbo" is one of those cool, five-dollar words you don't hear nearly often enough. Still, how did the makers of Guns Akimbo miss the opportunity to call their Daniel "You're A Wizard Harry" Radcliffe-starring action comedy about a guy with guns nailed to his hands Harry Potter and the Crucifixion Pistols?
This indie laughs-and-carnage fest from Saban Films - in partnership with literally a dozen other micro-studios and the New Zealand Film Commission - is a demented conjoined triplet of a flick. It's mostly a fish-out-of-water comedy about a nerdy code monkey being forced to fight for his life. The comedy stretches are punctuated loudly and often, think post-Taco Bell farts, by hits of ultraviolence that are as warped as they are gory. Underneath all that, there's an effort at social commentary about Interwebs troll culture, the uncommonness of common courtesy, and humanity's seemingly insatiable lust for bloody mayhem perpetrated by and on strangers.
In the Guns Akimbo universe, millions of people livestream death matches between two "contestants" on a site called Skizm. Skizm takes two competitors - sometimes voluntary, sometimes not so much - and pits them against each other not in a ring or octagon but out on the street. The only thing less effective than bullets in Guns Akimbo (people get shot 20 times and still keep fighting) are cops, who never once manage to stop running gunfights tearing the absolute ass out of their cities.
The reigning Skizm champion is Nix (Samara "Margot Robbie Better Watch The Fuck Out" Weaving), and she's a smokin' hot, gothed out, killing machine which makes her a very special kind of wet dream for a huge slice of the male population. After Radcliffe's Miles trolls them mercilessly (calling himself a "troll hunter" which, clearly, is just another kind of troll), the cyberpunk refugees that run Skizm kidnap him, bolt and nail pistols to his hands, and force him to try to survive going head to head with Nix.
Geeks the world over will lap this shit up. If Weaving, Harry Potter, meme culture jokes, and fountains of blood don't do it, references to Cypress Hill, MC Hammer, "Ballroom Blitz," and He-Man will guarantee copious nerdgasms.
June 5, 2020