A satire of overamped gamer culture that is itself too overamped to be much fun, “Guns Akimbo” takes a while before it stops showing off its virtuosity — shots that turn cartwheels, frantic cutting, an onslaught of graphics — and finds a groove.
Daniel Radcliffe plays Miles, a coding drone who spends his days glued to various devices. One night, he gets into an insult match on a site for Skizm, an underground fight club that selects random oddballs and criminals and pairs them against each other in mortal bouts. Spectators watch remotely, à la “The Truman Show.” Although there is a system of scoring points, the violence is real.
So it goes that Skizm’s boss (Ned Dennehy) and his thugs, offended by Miles’s online commentary, slam in his door and bolt guns to his hands, turning him into a participant. The surgical alterations complicate almost any task (other than shooting). Miles’s opponent: Nix (Samara Weaving), a merciless high-scorer. Will this dorky asthmatic, unable to tap on his phone (“Everything looks so HD,” he remarks, finally paying attention to the world around him), summon his inner alpha from the virtual realm?
The message — Miles’s nice-guy demeanor is both his weakness and his salvation — gets a little muddled. In a case of life imitating fiction, the writer-director, Jason Lei Howden, got into a Twitter skirmish shortly before the movie’s release. The distributor, Saban Films, said in a statement that it did not condone his “online behavior.” Considering what happens to his protagonist, that is a slap on the wrist.
Guns Akimbo
Rated R. Pervasive slaughter. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
