Guns Akimbo is a New Zealand made action comedy movie written and directed by Jason Lei Howden. It tells the story of game designer and self-proclaimed internet troll vigilante Miles played by Daniel Radcliffe, who accidentally insults the wrong keyboard warrior and wakes up with guns bolted to his hands and is forced to participate in a sick game of kill or be killed.
Now, first of all, I remember seeing a meme titled crackhead harry potter around 2018 time and it involved Radcliffe stood in the street wielding two pistols, whilst stood in Bear slippers and a robe. And straight away I wanted to know what film this was but I couldn’t find anything of the sort…that was of course until a couple of months ago when the trailer dropped and it looked so over the top and crazy I just had to watch it.
So how was it?
In a nutshell, it’s not awful but it isn’t great either the premise was a cool concept and the first half of the film was great but the second half fell flat and was just boring.
So let’s talk about the good half and the positive points of the film first. Daniel Radcliffe carries this movie as much as he can he is the highlight of this movie, all of his dialogue fit the character he was portraying he came across as this awkward, geeky-coward who couldn’t harm a fly even if he wanted to. The visuals in this movie are also pretty great they go for this neon video game style visuals that compliment the movie well. It reminded me of Scott Pilgrim vs the world which opted for a similar style of effects or the video game RAGE 2 for anyone who has played that. And as mentioned above the first half of the movie is great it’s very fast-paced and a lot that’s pretty entertaining happens and if it kept up that style of film making the movie would have been awesome rather than just okay.
The second half of the movie falls flat on all levels, the jokes do not land the dialogue is cringy and uninteresting and the acting seems to take a turn into Razzie territory from most of the supporting cast. But the worst offence is that the movie just drags on way too long and just gets so boring even though the movies second half is where most of the action and gunfights happen, it just doesn’t grab my attention as the first half did, which is a huge shame as this could be a great movie.
Guns Akimbo was an ambitious movie and it just scrapes enough positives to outweigh the negatives. I would probably not watch this again voluntarily but if it came on TV one night and nothing was on I would probably watch it again rather then get an early night…however I may not stay awake for the entire thing.
Final Score.
Title:Okay
Guns Akimbo flaunts a high adrenaline and entertaining first half going guns blazing and emptying its magazine with great accuracy…and its unfortunate it forgets to reload for the second half and fizzles out to a pretty mediocre second act however there is still plenty to enjoy in the good in the film as a whole,despite its flaws.
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