Review of Guns Akimbo (2020) by Hnestlyonthesly — 02 Mar 2020

"What is it about?" Wife asked. "Harry Potter with Gun Hands in a Social Media Battle Royale." The wide release for this movie was this weekend, so there's always a chance it will go through a Cats-like recall where the director will try to salvage his movie after pulling the trigger (ahem) on a poorly executed (hemhemhem) movie. Absent that, there's not that much to say. Despite the fact that Harry Potter, Samara Weaving (Ready or Not, but made to look like a traumatized albino), and the venerable Ned Dennehy (whom I know best from the Good Omens miniseries as a Duke of Hell) act the hell out of trashy script, they lack the ability to put a new spin on some tired social media battle royale commentary genre tropes (how did this become a genre so quickly?). As you already know, dear reader, I'm still pretty uncertain about how to feel about Assassination Nation, whose premise was also a critique on doxxing and social media culture at large along with the sexualization of teen girls, because I haven't been able to have a sit down with anyone older than sixteen to talk about the movie, but I do have pretty firm feelings about 2016's Nerve and last year's Escape Room. I consider Nerve (and maybe Assassination Nation???) to be the high water mark of social media adventure films of this decade. If we can't agree about that, we're not going to agree about anything below, because Harry Potter and the Night of Two Hundred Bullets feels highly derivative of Nerve in its premise and delivery, with maybe even less to say about social media than Escape Room, which just goes to show how little thought went into the plot of this movie. Nerve shares some important similarities in that it 1) has some young adult star power, 2) its premise relies on the idea of a wildly popular social media fight club type organization set in the near future, and 3) the protagonists find a way to turn the tables on the organization in the end. The difference is Nerve slowly ratchets up the tension by making the dares go from being innocuous voyeuristic challenges to nasty, violent conundrums. HP and the Third Person Shooter starts at an 11 and stays there. We don't have a sense that the director has any subtle views about the public's interaction with violence in media. Viewers of "Skizm"'s show are an omnipresent Greek chorus, possibly (Friend suggested) a heavy-handed audience surrogate that doesn't add much to the pleasure of watching, but definitely makes you think that the director would've been busy reading poetry during gladiatorial games in Rome. In fact, the one note performance by everyone in that chorus has kind of the opposite of its intended effect, because it makes the critique of social media nastiness feel like hand wringing. Without being able to see our surrogates using social media passively, actively, and then ruthlessly, it doesn't feel nuanced. When Radcliffe's character self-deprecatingly describes his relationship with social media (while dropping trow in an office bathroom) as endless cycling through "three apps" on his phone, its at once over-simplistic and unhelpfully accurate. He's right, but Miles isn't (only) creeping on Instagram and scrolling through Reddit, he's also secretly obsessed with some pretty filthy internet subcultures, so to say that he's One of Us, an everyman internet denizen, doesn't quite ring true. It's not the only place Harry Potter and the Free Fire Fiesta with Worse Aim actively undermines itself.The fantasy sequences feel oddly counterproductive since they're almost entirely critiques of anti-feminist tropes of women as reward (thank you, Anita Sarkeesian and B* Magazine--everything you touch is gold), but in the act of drawing our attention the movie's attempt to move away from the trope, it perpetuates the stereotype. The movie tries to come off as clever and twee about making progressive plot choices, but also attempts to get away with showing its audience the wish-fulfillment it thinks they might want to see. The inability to let a definitive choice stand without observation and voice over navel-gazing pervades the film and gives it a unfinished quality.

Lastly, Harry Potter and the Gun Fight With Witty Banter is confused about its tone. Obviously, the premise of the movie is shooting (cough cough cough) for absurdist comedy, but there are moments, particularly concerning the objectivity of violence, that come into conflict with that tone. Miles's first and inglorious kill--which, by the by, is reminiscent of Rhythm Section's first kill in the field (!)--features an unhelpful voice over, "No one ups, no extra lives, I just killed that guy." Instead of giving us the chance to watch Radcliffe show his trauma, we're fed a milquetoast and feeble thought bubble. Similarly, there's no retrospection when it comes to the point blank assassination of Miles's friend or Nix's father or even the off-brand M&M policeman giving off Charlie Day vibes toward the end.