Guns Akimbo (2020)

Guns Akimbo arrives with a premise that sounds like a thesis topic and a delivery that sounds like a car alarm. Daniel Radcliffe plays Miles, a computer programmer who insults the audience of a live-streamed death match and is promptly fitted with pistols bolted to both hands. The film has opinions about the commodification of violence. It expresses them at a volume that makes conversation impossible. Skizm sells murder as content, expands into a global franchise, and the screenplay shakes its head at us for watching. The critique is real, if shallow, and it is delivered through shootouts instead of speeches.

On the identity front, the film is largely indifferent. Samara Weaving's Nix is a formidable presence with a tragic backstory, though the story treats her as a weapon with a wound, not as a case study in anything. Nova, the ex-girlfriend, exists to be kidnapped and later to be frightened by what Miles is becoming. She is a plot device with a sketchbook. Actors of color fill out the supporting cast without the film making any remarks about them, which is its own kind of statement, or possibly an absence of one. The film has no interest in bodies as political subjects, no interest in neurodivergence as identity, and no interest in history, climate, or the various other ledgers of contemporary concern.

Its anger is aimed at screens and the people who watch them. That is an old anger, dressed in new violence. The result plays like a sugar rush with a grudge, frenetic and occasionally numbing, and it earns a modest place in the taxonomy of films that scold their audience while handing them a controller.