Skizm is the latest craze. People watch online as two contestants battle it out to the death. Miles (Daniel Radcliffe) is a meek internet troll who spams the Skizm message boards with comments condemning the sport. The leader of the organization, Riktor (Ned Dennehy) tracks Miles down and forces him to be Skizm’s latest contestant by bolting guns to his hands. To make matters worse, if Miles doesn’t kill his competitor (Samara Weaving) in twenty-four hours, Riktor will off his girlfriend (Natasha Liu Bordizzo).
The first twenty minutes or so had me ready to abandon ship. I have seen some annoying camerawork and erratic editing in my time, but this might’ve been the worst. Seriously, it was like the cameraman got jacked up on Red Bull and tried to out-Sam Raimi Sam Raimi. Meanwhile, the editor got blitzed on chocolate and Mountain Dew and cut everything to ribbons, rendering the already chaotic action sequences nearly impossible to watch.
Thankfully, things settled down once the film entered the second act, and the rest of the action sequences were much more tolerable. In fact, there were stretches where I thought Guns Akimbo was actually going to overcome the first act handicap and find its stride. That was mostly due to Radcliffe’s inspired harried performance. Unfortunately, things got increasingly dumb as the movie went down the homestretch.
The plot (which is essentially The Running Man Meets Upgrade Meets Nerve) is already thin, and the points writer/director James Lei (Deathgasm) Howden makes are obvious at best and painfully stupid at worst. It wouldn’t have been so bad if he hadn’t been so in your face with the camerawork and editing. The sequences where Howden tries to make the action resemble a video game are particularly idiotic and look like Scott Pilgrim vs. the World remade as a shoot ‘em up.
I wanted to like it, but it was just ultimately too dumb for its own good. How dumb? Well, at one point, when a bad guy threatens Weaving with a hammer, they play “Super Freak” on the soundtrack. I mean, shouldn’t they be playing “U Can’t Touch This” (you know, “Stop! Hammer time!”) and not the song it sampled from? That’s just a sterling example of how fundamentally misguided the whole thing is.
I thought this film was fucking awesome and not dumb at all.
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